Re: State of devfs in 2.6?

Greg KH
2003-12-09T08:35:47Z

On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 08:02:19AM +0100, Andreas Jellinghaus wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-12-09 at 00:34, Greg KH wrote:
> > You have 15 floppy devices connected to your box? All floppy devices
> > should show up in /sys/block.
>
> No, 16 devices are normal, sysfs has only one:
> aj@simulacron:~/torrent/j-tv/download$ ls /dev/floppy/
> 0 0u1120 0u1600 0u1722 0u1760 0u1920 0u720 0u820
> 0u1040 0u1440 0u1680 0u1743 0u1840 0u360 0u800 0u830
> aj@simulacron:~/torrent/j-tv/download$ find /sys/block/fd* -name dev
> /sys/block/fd0/dev
>
> Are those floppy devices obsolete? fdformat was the only app to use
> them anyway, I guess. (Not that I use my floppy, I simply noticed
> the change.)

I don't know if they are obsolete or not. I've never used them, and
trying to figure out the floppy driver just makes my head hurt. I'm
sure that if anyone really does use them, and udev doesn't work for
them, I'll hear about it :)

> > Regardless of the state of udev, devfs has insolvable problems and you
> > should not use it. End of story.
>
> how many bug reports did you see in the last three months of people
> having problems with devfs?

I don't think that all 4 users of devfs on 2.6 are all that vocal :)
Either way, I haven't been paying attention, as I really don't care.

> I don't doubt the problems in theory, but but I simply haven't seen
> them happening. Most users seem quite happy.

There's no accounting for taste, is there. Anyway, sure some users
might be happy, but when the kernel vfs maintainer shows that it's
pretty simple to deadlock your kernel, and when the devfs maintainer
disappears from view for over a year, that might be a good indication
that you might want to stop using it.

Besides, there's only one "major" distro still using devfs, and that's
just because they don't know any better.

thanks,

greg k-h

/me prepares for another onslaught of complaints from Gentoo users