Re: State of devfs in 2.6?

Andreas Jellinghaus
2003-12-08T23:03:24Z

On Mon, 08 Dec 2003 15:50:45 +0000, William Lee Irwin III wrote:
> I would say it's deprecated at the very least. sysfs and udev are
> supposed to provide equivalent functionality, albeit by a somewhat
> different mechanism.

huh?

aj@simulacron:/dev$ find -type c -mount |grep -v pty |wc -l
164
aj@simulacron:/dev$ find -type b |wc -l
157
aj@simulacron:/dev$ find /sys/ -name dev |wc -l
250

After ignoring .devfsd we are left with 70 devices missing:
- 15 floppy devices
- 5 input/ devices
- full, kmem, kmsg, mem, null, port, random, urandom, zero
- printers/0
- 5 misc/ devices
- 12 snd/ devices
- 5 sound/ devices
- 18 vcc/ devices

I wouldn't call udev deprecated, unless a newer kernel has the
essential devices, too. And is there a udev version that can
do devfs names? last time I checked only lanana names were supported.

Some distributions were quite happy to move from /dev and lanana to
devfs with better names. I doubt everyone will rush to udev with
lanana names, and re-introducing makedev for devices not represented
in sysfs doesn't sound very nice either. So 2.8.* might be a nice time
frame for dropping devfs, or at least give sysfs and udev a few months
to catch up on the issues mentioned.

Andreas