Re: Adding PCMCIA support to the kernel tree -- developers needed.

[David Brownell <david-b@pacbell.net>]

Could you elaborate on "more than devfs"?

I know some criticisms of devfs:  it didn't get drivers out of the business
of preallocating major/minor device numbers.  (Why should there be
so few /dev/input device nodes available?)  And the "let a million
symlinks bloom" role of devfsd isn't necessarily desired.  "devfs"
doesn't know about /proc/bus/... physical names (maybe shouldn't);
it doesn't know about network interface names (maybe shouldn't).

One thing I think I see missing is a way to relate the "logical" names
(like /dev/input/* or /dev/audio*) to physical ones (based on topology,
like /proc/bus/*).  That's something "cardmgr" does inside itself
("eth0" is pcmia slot 1) as I recall.  It should be possible to set up
a topology-based naming policy so that we never see "mouse999"
style names, but only ".../kiosk42/mouse" style ones ... at least
after the system has fully booted.

But I don't yet see all that adding up to something I could wrap my
head around and use or implement ... needs more discussion! :-)

- Dave


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Vojtech Pavlik" <vojtech@suse.cz>
To: "Oliver Neukum" <Oliver.Neukum@lrz.uni-muenchen.de>
Cc: "David Brownell" <david-b@pacbell.net>; <linux-hotplug-devel@lists.sourceforge.net>
Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2001 7:13 AM
Subject: Re: Adding PCMCIA support to the kernel tree -- developers needed.


> On Wed, Feb 07, 2001 at 11:43:24PM +0100, Oliver Neukum wrote:
> 
> > > Yet.  The stack we're looking at today has two layers:  bus (USB, PCI),
> > > and "next" (network).  Printers and disks will be layered above busses;
> > > PCMCIA is another bus.
> > 
> > I see. However as soon as you take PCI into the picture, that's all
> > devices. It begins to look like recreating devfs.
> 
> Actually I think that we need more than just devfs. Devfs stopped too
> early and focuses only on the userland interface (/dev/*). If we manage
> to get us stable names, we'll need more than devfs and I think that
> we'll also make devfs obsolete.
> 
> -- 
> Vojtech Pavlik
> SuSE Labs
> 



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