Re: RFC: Remove pty(4)

> On Aug 20, 2014, at 11:05, Alfred Perlstein <bright_at_mu.org> wrote:
> 
>> On 8/20/14 11:00 AM, Davide Italiano wrote:
>> One of my personal goals for 11 is to get rid of cloning mechanism
>> entirely, and pty(4) is one of the few in-kernel drivers still relying
>> on such mechanism.
>> It's not possible, at least to my understanding, converting pty(4) to
>> cdevpriv(9) as happened with other drivers. This is mainly because we
>> always need a pair of devices (/dev/ptyXX and /dev/ttyXX) and
>> userspace loops over ptyXX and after it successfully opens it tries to
>> open the other one with the same suffix. So, having a single device is
>> not really enough.
>> My option, instead, is that of removing pty(4), which is nothing more
>> than a compatibility driver, and move pmtx(4) code somewhere else.
>> The main drawback of the removal of this is that it makes impossible
>> to run FreeBSD <= 7 jails and SSH into them. I personally don't
>> consider this a huge issue, in light of the fact that FreeBSD-7 has
>> been EOL for a long time, but I would like to hear other people
>> comments.
>> 
>> The code review for the proposed change can be found here:
>> https://reviews.freebsd.org/D659
>> 
>> If I won't get any objection I'll commit this in one week time, i.e.
>> August 27th.
> I don't think that we want to break userland apps pre-7.x.  Do you mean just jails are broken?  Or is all pre-7.x compat?  I believe either is dicey.  What is the reason for getting rid of cloning? What is the difficulty in maintaining the old interface?

    Doing this would also break login shells, xterms, etc, right? Some companies I worked for built their appliance products on newer OSes, and they were based off of 6 and 7. This seems like something that deserves being tossed into the compat layer if it's something that can be converted over to the new interface.
Thanks!
-Garrett