RFC: Remove pty(4)

[Alfred Perlstein]

On Nov 27, 2014, at 1:52 AM, Konstantin Belousov wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 04:41:27PM -0800, Davide Italiano wrote:
>> On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 12:37 PM, John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org> wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, August 20, 2014 11:00:14 AM Davide Italiano wrote:
>>>> One of my personal goals for 11 is to get rid of cloning mechanism
>>>> entirely, and pty(4) is one of the few in-kernel drivers still relying
>>>> on such mechanism.
> Why this is good thing to do ?
> 
>>>> It's not possible, at least to my understanding, converting pty(4) to
>>>> cdevpriv(9) as happened with other drivers. This is mainly because we
>>>> always need a pair of devices (/dev/ptyXX and /dev/ttyXX) and
>>>> userspace loops over ptyXX and after it successfully opens it tries to
>>>> open the other one with the same suffix. So, having a single device is
>>>> not really enough.
>>>> My option, instead, is that of removing pty(4), which is nothing more
>>>> than a compatibility driver, and move pmtx(4) code somewhere else.
>>>> The main drawback of the removal of this is that it makes impossible
>>>> to run FreeBSD <= 7 jails and SSH into them. I personally don't
>>>> consider this a huge issue, in light of the fact that FreeBSD-7 has
>>>> been EOL for a long time, but I would like to hear other people
>>>> comments.
> You don't, but other people care about ABI.
> 
> Besides older jails which you do not care about, there is significant
> set of programs which were coded to use Berkley' pty directly.  Even
> high-profile applications like Emacs automatically selected pty(4)
> up to its previous version on FreeBSD.
> 
>>>> 
>>>> The code review for the proposed change can be found here:
>>>> https://reviews.freebsd.org/D659
>>>> 
>>>> If I won't get any objection I'll commit this in one week time, i.e.
>>>> August 27th.
>>> 
>>> Why not just statically create the pairs in /dev?  Use some loader tunable
>>> (kern.ptymax) to set a count on the number of pre-created device pairs to
>>> create and then just explicitly create them in the mod_event handler?  It
>>> could default to 100 or so.
>>> 
>> 
>> Done, thank you for the suggestion, John.
>> 
>> root at maxwell:/home/davide # kldload pty
>> root at maxwell/home/davide # sysctl -a |grep pty
>> kern.tty_pty_warningcnt: 1
>> kern.npty: 32
>> debug.softdep.emptyjblocks: 0
>> 
>> root at maxwell:/home/davide # ls /dev/pty*
>> /dev/ptyl0 /dev/ptyl2 /dev/ptyl4 /dev/ptyl6 /dev/ptyl8 /dev/ptyla
>> /dev/ptylc /dev/ptyle /dev/ptylg /dev/ptyli /dev/ptylk /dev/ptylm
>> /dev/ptylo /dev/ptylq /dev/ptyls /dev/ptylu
>> /dev/ptyl1 /dev/ptyl3 /dev/ptyl5 /dev/ptyl7 /dev/ptyl9 /dev/ptylb
>> /dev/ptyld /dev/ptylf /dev/ptylh /dev/ptylj /dev/ptyll /dev/ptyln
>> /dev/ptylp /dev/ptylr /dev/ptylt /dev/ptylv
>> 
>> https://reviews.freebsd.org/D1238 for review.
>> I hope anybody that raised concerns about the previous patch can try
>> this new one.
> 
> I do not see why dev_clone event makes your so unhappy.  I object against
> removal of it (and this is what you are aiming at, it seems).  It provides
> useful functionality, which is not substituted by anything cdevpriv(9)
> can provide.
> 
> My only hope is that you are confusing dev_clone event and a library of
> clone_create(9)/clone_cleanup(9)/dev_stdclone(9) functions.  The former
> is needed and cannot be replaced by cdevpriv(9).
> 
> The later is clumsy and never was used properly. My opinion is that it
> is impossible to use properly. There are five uses of that in tree left,
> and it seems that removing them worth cleaning of buggy by design and
> undocumented KPI.
> 
> Really big and complicated target is the hand-written timeout-based (?!)
> custom cloning code in snd(4).  I believe it _can_ be converted to
> cdevpriv(9).

Thank you kib, I feel the same about leaving the pty system as it is.

-Alfred