Re: [RFC] fix devpts mount behavior

[Sukadev Bhattiprolu <sukadev@linux.vnet.ibm.com>]

Linus Torvalds [torvalds@linux-foundation.org] wrote:
| On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 4:25 PM, Serge Hallyn
| <serge.hallyn@canonical.com> wrote:
| >
| > The only place that *might* be a problem is if initramsfs does a devpts
| > mount, and later init blindly mounts tmpfs on /dev and mounts a new
| > devpts.  But it seems unlikely there would be any open pty's so it
| > shouldn't really matter.
| 
| Right. I think the opportunity for problems should be pretty small.
| 
| And it's not like the pty itself wouldn't continue to work - it's just
| that programs like /usr/bin/tty wouldn't be able to *find* it.
| 
| Although who knows - maybe there is some other subtle interaction.
| 
| > I could go ahead and test that, say, ubuntu and fedora systems boot fine
| > with this change.  But of course I can't be sure there is no userspace
| > out there that won't cope...
| 
| I think the only way is to try it out.
| 
| If you can test a few distros and at least validate that the approach
| isn't *totally* broken, I'll apply it. It's early days in the -rc
| series yet, and this does seem to be one of those things that we'd be
| better off trying to do early rather than delay.

Yes, hopefully the new distros can cope with 'newinstance' as the default
and ones that can't can live with CONFIG_DEVPTS_MULTIPLE_INSTANCES=n.

Sukadev