libio preparation for file systems

[Chris Johns]

Joel Sherrill wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 26 Feb 1998, Robin Kirkham wrote:
> 
> >
> > On Tue, 24 Feb 1998, Joel Sherrill wrote:
> >
> >
> > It's occurred to me that if we have an effective system of mountable
> > namespaces, which are easy to implement, you can have the best of both worlds.
> > You would write your ADC driver (or whatever) not as a driver, but as one
> > of these namespace/filesystems. This particular space would implement
> > a flat namespace consisting only of numbers, one for each channel. This
> > you would mount on, say, /dev/adc, so that the ADCs were /dev/adc/0,
> > /dev/adc/1, and so on.
> 
> Cool idea.  This would be a very good way to do the discretes.  You could
> even have the names as word-start-width-return_type.  So 0-3-15-32 would
> read work 0, starting at bit 3, for a width of 15, and return it in
> an unsigned32.  Having mountable file systems of varying types is a very
> powerful thing.
> 

I also agree. I have been looking for a way to manage a very basic
element management user interface. I decided a sort of directory tree
would be the way. For example the rtems monitor. If a basic shell
existed, a user could enter

$ cd /cmds/mon
$ ls
< list of monitor commands >
$ task
< monitor task command output >

The sort of approach above would help to achive this. All this
filesystem would do is call functions with the remainder of the
command line.

Regards

-- 
 Chris Johns  Networks, Plessey Asia Pacfic Pty. Ltd.
  mailto:ccj at acm.org    mailto:cjohns at plessey.com.au