Re: State of devfs in 2.6?

Paul P Komkoff Jr
2003-12-09T12:54:24Z

Replying to Andrew Walrond:
> My initial query has thrown up lots of interesting debate :)
>
> I, like most people I suspect, love the concept of a complete auto-populated
> dev directory, and not having to MAKEDEV.
>
> devfs provided this, but like most people who read LKML, I stopped using it
> when it's problems were discussed.
>
> I really hope udev lives up to its promise, unlike devfs. Manually creating /
> dev just annoys me for no apparent reason other than it's plain inelegance I
> suppose.

The one of main benefits I considered when focusing my attention on
devfs-like approach is space consumption. Somewhat-populated dev
subdirectory (looking at fedora 1) have about 7k items inside, each of
them eating its inode and (depends on underlying fs) a block.

I agree that previous implementation may be racy, domb, gooched,
whatever.
but
is it sane that for system to function correcly I should carry over
a whole bunch of directory entries, when I actually have all
information about it in kernel, somewhere buried under major-minor
declarations.

That is, udev backed on tmpfs approach are almost
solving our problem. But not completely. Module autoloading is useful,
actually, was useful in conjunction with module unloading - if
unloading support is poor autoloading is almost useless ...

--
Paul P 'Stingray' Komkoff Jr // http://stingr.net/key <- my pgp key
This message represents the official view of the voices in my head