amd64/88249: getdents syscall fails for devfs on amd64 linuxalator

[John Baldwin]

On Monday 07 November 2005 03:00 pm, Devon O'Dell wrote:
>  The long discussion ended up implying several things:
>
>  d) The issue probably isn't limited to linuxulator, but to any
>     filesystem that uses cookies and exports devfs. Thus, panics (or
>     hangs) will probably occur for devfs being exported over AFS or NFS.

Well, it shouldn't panic, that's for sure.

>  The attached patch does two things:
>
>  a) If we are provided with cookie information in devfs, we currently
>     do not support this. This means we cannot export devfs over network
>     mounts, which I don't view as a problem (but would be a cool
>     feature).

Actually, it would be a worse than useless feature when you consider dynamic 
major number allocation (so that /dev/cuad0 on one machine might map 
to /dev/acd0 on another machine) not to mention the fact that on FreeBSD, at 
least, we don't have specfs anymore, so you can't look devices up by just 
major/minor, but it has to be by their name through an instance of devfs.  
So, only non-FreeBSD clients could even use the exported char devs, and 
FreeBSD char devs are less than useless on non-FreeBSD operating systems.

-- 
John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>  <><  http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve"  =  http://www.FreeBSD.org