Re: [PATCH] kill i_dev

["H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>]

Followup to:  <Pine.LNX.4.44.0211211548530.5779-100000@penguin.transmeta.com>
By author:    Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
> 
> Applied.
> 
> > There is a single side effect: a stat on a socket now sees
> > a nonzero st_dev. There is nothing against that - FreeBSD
> > has a nonzero value as well - but there is at least one
> > utility (fuser) that will need an update.
> 
> Looking at the patch (not testing it), as far as I can tell we'll return a 
> basically random number that is just whatever the anonymous super-block 
> was allocated, right?
> 
> I'm not convinced that returning random numbers to user space is
> necessarily a great idea.. That said, I think we already do it for unnamed
> pipes anyway, so I'm more wondering if we should have some way to map
> these numbews (in user space) to a valid thing, so that they wouldn't just
> be random numbers.
> 

What's really important is that they don't map to anything else.  I
don't think it matters what the numbers is, since there is a much
better way to find out that you're a pipe or a socket.

	-hpa
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