From: Padraig Brady (padraig at domain antefacto.com)
Date: Wed 02 May 2001 - 15:16:44 IST
I was wondering about this myself lately.
It think it's cos they can push data to you at any
time. "Ordinary" devices must be proactively opened
and read()/write() done, whereas data can arrive
at a network interface at any time, and it's not
necessarily destined for a particular process. I.E.
the kernel must respond to pings etc. independent
of any process. It must also mux data from one
interface to many processes. To me a socket() is
associated with a process and is on the same level
as a device in /dev, and in fact is in the filesystem
in /proc/$$/fd
It might be interesting to look at domain how plan9 is
organised in this regard, and basically it's a effort
to clean up UNIX and enforce the "everything" is
a file idea.
Padraig.
kevin lyda wrote:
>
> ok, why are network devices special under linux/unix? why isn't
> there a /dev/eth0? "interfaces" have their own special namespace,
> completely separate from every other namespace. why?
>
> kevin
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