[9fans] I found this discussion pretty funny

[dexen deVries]

get to the part about why it's so great that pipe is a system call,
not a device.
This is the sort of back-and-forth that reminds me why I can't quite
give up on plan 9 ...
http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/everything_is_file.html
"Do we create pipes by opening /dev/pipe? No. "
and
"Yes, some old-timers could argue that original UNIX didn't have sockets,
and that the BSD interface is ugly and an abomination and that it _should_
have been a namespace thing, but that argument falls flat on its face when
you realize that the "pipe()" system call _was_ in original UNIX, and has
all the same issues."
ah well. It seems that the guy who wrote pipe() might not agree that
he does not know much about Unix ... but so it goes.

a technical and organizational problem: back then Linux' /dev consisted of
special files held on drive, its MAJOR/MINOR schema* getting dangerously
cramped.

those days Linux' /dev is usually mounted at boot and maintained by kernel,
somewhat alike /proc; adding some more entries probably isn't that much of a
problem.

[erik quanstrom]

"Yes, some old-timers could argue that original UNIX didn't have sockets,
and that the BSD interface is ugly and an abomination and that it _should_
have been a namespace thing, but that argument falls flat on its face when
you realize that the "pipe()" system call _was_ in original UNIX, and has
all the same issues."

appeal to the authority of the unix authors as a defense of sockets?
surely someone has missed a bit.

or another way, since the original was broken, we must not work correctly?

i'm tempted to draw one of those ascii slashdot memes

unix →

\o/
|
/\

woosh!

- erik

[c***@gmx.de]

whats the issue? plan9 has a syscall to create anonymous pipes:

#define PIPE 21

--
cinap

[Charles Forsyth]

but that just turns round and uses the name space (like a few other system
calls).

[c***@gmx.de]

yeah, like mount... its files all the way down :)

linux is like windows... everything is a HANDL^Wfiledescriptor

--
cinap

[Francisco J Ballesteros]

did you notice the discussion was from this century?
surprising!

Post by c***@gmx.de
yeah, like mount... its files all the way down :)
linux is like windows... everything is a HANDL^Wfiledescriptor
--
cinap

[t***@polynum.com]

get to the part about why it's so great that pipe is a system call,
not a device.
This is the sort of back-and-forth that reminds me why I can't quite
give up on plan 9 ...
http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/everything_is_file.html

I like the way the discussion goes. From an outspoken Linus Torvalds
saying "nonsense", to a diving into details that progressively gives
points to some operating system with both "a lot of things are files",
and namespaces---these are related, but not identical.

[Bakul Shah]

Post by dexen deVries
a technical and organizational problem: back then Linux' /dev consisted of
special files held on drive, its MAJOR/MINOR schema* getting dangerously
cramped.
those days Linux' /dev is usually mounted at boot and maintained by kernel,
somewhat alike /proc; adding some more entries probably isn't that much of a
problem.

You should explore /sys on Linux. They've embraced namespaces in a major way.

$ df /sys
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
sysfs 0K 0K 0K - /sys
$ ls -lR /sys |wc
10485 63451 419873
$ ls -l /sys/dev/block/8:1
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 0 Oct 17 11:31 /sys/dev/block/8:1 -> ../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:0d.0/host2/target2:0:0/2:0:0:0/block/sda/sda1

Let us see where this leads:

$ ls -Ll /sys/dev/block/8:1
total 0K
-r--r--r--. 1 root root 4096 Oct 17 11:31 alignment_offset
-r--r--r--. 1 root root 4096 Oct 17 11:31 dev
-r--r--r--. 1 root root 4096 Oct 17 11:31 discard_alignment
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 0 Oct 17 11:26 holders
-r--r--r--. 1 root root 4096 Oct 17 11:31 inflight
-r--r--r--. 1 root root 4096 Oct 17 11:31 partition
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 0 Oct 17 11:31 power
-r--r--r--. 1 root root 4096 Oct 17 11:25 size
-r--r--r--. 1 root root 4096 Oct 17 11:31 start
-r--r--r--. 1 root root 4096 Oct 17 11:31 stat
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 0 Oct 17 11:31 subsystem
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 0 Oct 17 11:31 trace
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 4096 Oct 17 11:31 uevent

Exploring further...

$ ls -l /sys/dev/block/8:1/subsystem
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 0 Oct 17 11:31 /sys/dev/block/8:1/subsystem -> ../../../../../../../../../class/block

Editorial comments left as an exercise to the reader!

[erik quanstrom]

Post by Bakul Shah
You should explore /sys on Linux. They've embraced namespaces in a major way.

what am i missing. linux' /sys is just a synthetic filesystem. where do you
see this exploring the idea of namespace?

- erik

[Bakul Shah]

Post by erik quanstrom

Post by Bakul Shah
You should explore /sys on Linux. They've embraced namespaces in a major way.

what am i missing. linux' /sys is just a synthetic filesystem. where do you
see this exploring the idea of namespace?

Oops. s/namespace/synthetic filesystem/

[David Leimbach]

Post by Bakul Shah

Post by erik quanstrom

Post by Bakul Shah
You should explore /sys on Linux. They've embraced namespaces in a

major way.

Post by erik quanstrom
what am i missing. linux' /sys is just a synthetic filesystem. where

do you

Post by erik quanstrom
see this exploring the idea of namespace?

Oops. s/namespace/synthetic filesystem/
It'd be a lot better if it was a synthetic file system in a restricted

namespace. I don't think 100% of the processes need to or should have the
opportunity to mess with /sys. But maybe that's just all this stuff I
learned from Plan 9. :-)

Dave

[Charles Forsyth]

http://planb.lsub.org/ls/octopus.html

is a user interface that includes graphics, exploits name space
representations, and doesn't just mimic the xerox desktop.