Re: udev and devfs - The final word

Helge Hafting
2004-01-01T01:07:23Z

On Tue, Dec 30, 2003 at 04:29:42PM -0800, Greg KH wrote:
>
> 2) We are (well, were) running out of major and minor numbers for
> devices.

devfs tried to fix this one by _getting rid_ of those numbers.
Seriously - what are they needed for?
(Yes, I know why they're needed with /dev on ext2)
Opening a device in devfs went straight to the device from the
inode - no extra lookup of "device numbers"
Numbers were provided mostly for backward compatibility - they
weren't used for the main task of accessing devices.

udev has many other advantages of course, too bad we still
have to carry those numbers around.

Helge Hafting