Re: Removal of /proc/asound ?

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

At Sun, 18 May 2003 08:13:31 +1000,
Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 17 May 2003 13:55:19 +0200 (CEST)
> Jaroslav Kysela <perex@suse.cz> wrote:
> 
> > I try to explain these things to avoid more confusion.
> > 
> > The dynamic devices created in proc filesystem does things similar as 
> > DEVFS. 
> 
> Thats fine, but now many people runnning 2.4 series kernels are using
> DEVFS?

i guess, no.  AFAIK, mandrake is the only major distributor which uses
devfs as default.

> > We used it, because in design time, we changed minor and major 
> > numbers for our devices heavily. Once we stabilized our devices, and DEVFS 
> > obsoleted our code (DEVFS is more generic), there is no reason to maintain 
> > this code anymore. Also, we are only one project doing this and we had 
> > requests from the kernel people to remove this code.
> 
> Was that request from the 2.4 kernel maintainers or the 2.5 people?
 
from 2.5 people.  ALSA is not in 2.4 kernels.

> If it was a request from the 2.5 kernel people, why is this change impacting
> people running 2.4 kernels.

i also thought of this.  in theory, it's not difficult to implement
the compatible layer.

meanwhile, it's not too hard to create device files, too.  once if you
made them, then the system works like before.

frankly saying, i'm not sure which is the really better way.
if there are MANY demands on the old way, we'll consider to implement
it back again (but not appearing in the 2.5 kernel tree :)


> > The current situation is that used /dev/snd symlink should be replaced
> > with directory containing static device entries (created by mknod). If you
> > use DEVFS, there is no difference and no extra steps are required.
> >
> > If the driver is installed via standard command 'make install' in the 
> > alsa-driver directory, the snddevices script is run automatically when 
> > /dev/snd is a symlink. 
> 
> How will this work if the user does not have a DEVFS enabled kernel?

run snddevices script once.  that's all.


ciao,

Takashi


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