Subject: [alpine-aports] Any chance of enabling makedevs in busybox?

From: Isaac Dunham <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2016 22:09:24 -0800

Hello,
Is there any chance of enabling makedevs (in table mode) in busybox?
While it's useless for device management, I'm contemplating using it
for a different purpose (creating fifos in bulk).

The long version is that I've been working on packaging xconsole, so I
can have an X window open watching for any sort of events that might need
investigating.
The standard approach is:
- add a line to /etc/syslog.conf that directs 'interesting' stuff to
 /dev/xconsole (and, of course, make sure that it still gets logged--
 busybox syslogd defaults to logging everything that hasn't been
 redirected into /var/log/messages, so you need to be careful.)
- create the fifo /dev/xconsole at boot (after starting the device manager)
- start syslogd with the new config
- run xconsole -file /dev/xconsole

Now, there are no hooks to create fifos in the early boot sequence, as far
as I can tell.
So I plan to write an init script that creates any fifos that may be
configured (after all, it's quite possible that someone would want to add
/dev/kconsole for any kernel messages, /dev/authconsole for security
messages...)
And it's also sensible to use different groups for monitoring different
aspects: you might not want everyone to read all of the same messages.

It's *possible* to do this all manually by invoking 
 mkfifo -m ... file
 chown user:group file
for every line in a custom config file.
But that's rather likely to bog down.

Another possibility is creating a config file, using that to generate a
cpio archive, and then extracting that at boot.
But this is a horrid hack that would be incredibly brittle.

The only other option I can think of (short of writing a tool) is to use
makedevs in table mode, so /etc/mkfifos.conf contains:
 /dev/xconsole p 0660 0 28 - - - - -

Thanks,
Isaac Dunham

---
Unsubscribe:  [email-masked]
Help:         [email-masked]
---