programmatic devices

[Wade Stebbings]

In article <10641 at ucsd.Edu> brian at ucsd.Edu (Brian Kantor) writes:
>A programmatic device (pdev) is a program (an executable binary) living
>in the /dev directory.  When a user program tries to open it for
>reading or writing, a process is started that runs the program, and
>ties its stdin and stdout to the user program open.  All I/O to and
>from the pdev appears to the user as though it is simply reading and
>writing a device; the pdev can open real or pseudo-devices and do real
>I/O as appropriate.  Ordinarily, the last close will cause the pdev to
>stop running and exit.  . . .

    SPRITE pseudo-devices are very similar to this idea; one main
difference is the way open/close are handled.  SPRITE is a Berkeley
research project.  I believe the paper "Pseudo Devices: User-Level
Extensions to the Sprite File System" is in the USENIX proceedings
from a couple years back (in San Francisco).  This stuff also runs
on BSD, if I remember the paper correctly.

wade