Re: [GIT PATCH] Remove devfs from 2.6.17

[Greg KH <gregkh@suse.de>]

On Sun, Jun 18, 2006 at 05:54:27PM -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> Samuel Thibault wrote:
> >
> >There has been at least my complaint about udev not being able to
> >auto-load modules on /dev entry lookup (28th March 2006):
> >
> >? Given a freshly booted linux box, hence uinput is not loaded (why
> >would it be, it doesn't drive any real hardware) ; what is the right
> >way(tm) for an application to have the uinput module loaded, so that it
> >can open /dev/input/uinput for emulating keypresses?
> >
> >- With good-old static /dev, we could just open /dev/input/uinput
> >  (installed by the distribution), and thanks to a
> >  alias char-major-10-223 uinput
> >  line somewhere in /etc/modprobe.d, uinput gets auto-loaded.
> >
> >- With devfs, it doesn't look like it works (/dev/misc/uinput is not
> >  present and opening it just like if it existed doesn't work). But I
> >  read in archives that it could be feasible.
> >
> >- With udev, this just cannot work. As explained in an earlier thread,
> >  even using a special filesystem that would report the opening attempt
> >  to udevd wouldn't work fine since udevd takes time for creating the
> >  device, and hence the original program needs to be notified ; this
> >  becomes racy.
> >
> 
> It would be nice if udev could be fed not just from the kernel, but from 
> the repository of modules that are available for loading.  That may 
> require additional module information.

There's no reason it could not be, but usually a simple, "modprobe loop"
works good enough for everyone :)

thanks,

greg k-h