On Sat, Jan 06, 2001 at 01:34:07PM -0500, S.Salman Ahmed wrote: > > I have one question regarding devfs: does it offer any performance > improvements over the traditional non-devfs setup, or is devfs simply a > 'structural' change ? i fail to see how typing: /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 instead of /dev/hda1 or /dev/wd0a whenever i need to do anything related to raw devices is a performance improvment. nor is writing huge kludgy initscripts or bloated daemons just so i can do: chgrp wheel /dev/somedevice chmod 660 /dev/somedevice and have it stick. (past reboots) as for anyone attempting to make the silly claim that /dev has thousands of devices and thus incurs the evil ext2fs directory slowness ask them why they are not turning /usr/bin into a fake filesystem. [eb@plato eb]$ ls -1 /dev | wc -l 1222 [eb@plato eb]$ ls -1 /usr/bin | wc -l 2109 [eb@plato eb]$ the only directory on my system which i can even percieve the slightest slowdown is /var/lib/dpkg/info, and even then its hardly noticable nor anything to cry about: [eb@plato eb]$ ls -1 /var/lib/dpkg/info | wc -l 5289 [eb@plato eb]$ better solutions to ext2 directory performance is fix the filesystem, reiserfs does not have this problem and i think ext3 does not either. the only other argument i ever hear is whining about device files with no corrosponding device, well i could care less. if i will never will have the device and it bothers me THAT much rm -f /dev/somedevice*. otherwise its nice to know exactly what permissions some hardware will have before installing it. /dev is not a database of what hardware is installed, that belongs to /sbin/lspci and /proc (though proc is a hideous mess, everything except processes should have been moved to /kern long ago) anyway thats just my rant on the subject, if you like devfs use it, but leave it an OPTION so i can leave it off. (and not an `option' like proc has become where you have the option to turn off and have a useless broken system) -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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