Problem with devfs and Unix98 pty

Christian Ullrich (chris@chrullrich.de)
Sun, 7 Jan 2001 13:45:31 +0100


The automatic saving and reloading of permissions and ownerships
by devfsd is not compatible with Unix98 ptys (in /dev/pts).

Imagine a user A trying to get a pty, for example by starting an
xterm. If there's a saved inode /dev-state/pts/<whatever> owned by
user B, and the next free number in /dev/pts equals <whatever>,
devfsd will replace the automatically created inode with the saved,
which is owned by B. So A does not have any chance at all to get
another pty.

I propose to add the following lines to the default devfsd.conf,
just above the last three lines:

REGISTER ^pts/.* IGNORE
CHANGE ^pts/.* IGNORE
CREATE ^pts/.* IGNORE

This fixed the problem for me. If you know a better solution,
please let me know.

-- 
Christian Ullrich		     Registrierter Linux-User #125183

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