Re: RFC: Starting a stable kernel series off the 2.6 kernel

Greg KH
2005-12-04T23:25:46Z

On Sun, Dec 04, 2005 at 04:46:31AM +0000, Luke-Jr wrote:
> Well, devfs does have some abilities udev doesn't: hotplug/udev
> doesn't detect everything, and can result in rarer or non-PnP devices
> not being automatically available;

Are you sure about that today? And udev wasn't created to do everything
that devfs does. And devfs can't do everything that udev can (by
far...)

> devfs has the effect of trying to load a module when a program looks
> for the devices it provides-- while it can cause problems, it does
> have a possibility to work better.

Sorry, but that model of loading modules is very broken and it is good
that we don't do that anymore (as you allude to.)

> Interesting effects of switching my desktop from devfs to udev:
> 1. my DVD burners are left uninitialized until I manually modprobe ide-cd or
> (more recently) ide-scsi

Sounds like a broken distro configuration :)

> 2. my sound card is autodetected and the drivers loaded, but the OSS emulation
> modules are omitted; with devfs, they would be autoloaded when an app tried
> to use OSS

Again, broken distro configuration :)

> devfs also has the advantage of keeping the module info all in one place-- the
> kernel or the module.

What?

> In particular, with udev the detection and /dev info is scattered into
> different locations of the filesystem. This can probably be fixed
> easily simply by having udev read such info from modules or via a /sys
> entry, though.

What information are you talking about here?

thanks,

greg k-h