Re: [Linux-fbdev-devel] Future of Framebuffer

[Paul M. <pm...@mv...>]

On Fri, Oct 05, 2001 at 11:30:12AM -0700, James Simmons wrote:
> I'm thinking devfs was designed with the one file decriptor to hardware
> model. As you know I plan to expand this.
>=20
devfs works fine with the one file descriptor per registered device model,
as that's what it was designed for. For any kind of specialized requirements
such as multiple file descriptors per registered device component, you are
no longer under the scope of what devfs was designed for, thus a new virtual
fs makes sense.

> > It would make more sense to implement it as its
> > own native virtual fs. As an example.. could have something like /dev/g=
fx
> > as a top level mountpoint for the fs, and then just mount on that (woul=
dn't
> > matter if it were devfs or not).
>=20
> True. Perhaps we should start off this way with a few device filesystems
> and see the commonality in them to figure out a common backbone. I just
> don't want to end up duplicating alot of what devfs has done.
>=20
There really shouldn't be too much duplication of devfs at all. I think the
only thing we really need to deal with devfs for would be for /dev/fb/0
registration.. at which point we can just register with devfs and have it
generate a symlink to the appropriate dentry under the gfxfs.. in this case
/dev/gfx/0/fb. Other than that, devfs has no reason to care about anything
else.

> > laying out the API would really be the biggest trick.
>=20
> Oh yeah. Tonight we can discuss some issues then.

Sounds good.

Regards,

--=20
Paul Mundt <pm...@mv...>
MontaVista Software, Inc.