links and lox, more of the same

[utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!unix-wizards]

>From Greg at NPRDC Wed Aug 19 01:22:37 1981
I agree with Bob Morris....  Fortunately, the problem with /etc/ttys
is easy to fix.  Once, when I was debugging a new device driver, I was
booting systems with and without the new driver.  I got so frustrated
with the system forking itself to death that I modified init so that
if the open fails, it logs an error message on the console and goes to
sleep forever.  The message contains the process ID, so if it is a fixable
problem, all you have to do is kill the process to cause init to try again.

But about locks....  Does anyone have a reliable (i.e., race-free)
locking method?  It seems to be not a problem in the case where you
don't have to worry about expiring locks -- either creat or link will
produce something reasonable; how about the expiring-lock problem?
ARPA may have gone off half-cocked in this case.