On Sat, Jan 06, 2001 at 12:38:57PM +1100, Brian May wrote:
> would anyone object if I made the diskless package depend on
> devfs support from 2.4.x in future versions?
No - in fact, I've wondered for the past couple of years now why Debian
hasn't already switched to devfs. (Patches existed for 2.0.30, making the
devfs patch available longer than I've used Linux..) Skip to the next set
of quoting if you don't care about an anecdotal example of just how lame
static /dev is..
/dev contains over a thousand entries, my box contains 1470 and there are
more it could contain if I actually were to add them to MAKEDEV or make
the nodes myself. Each device uses an inode without devfs, remember.
Looking at devices.txt and a recursive listing of /dev, seems that only
827 of those devices could possibly ever be used by my machine. Checking
atimes of those devices for those accessed in the last 3 months whose
atimes are not within 5 minutes of ctimes (to allow for creating a node
and then changing it's permissions) yielded 79 entries. A researched
guess tells me that the number moves closer to 200, slightly over it
possibly, if you count nodes made available by drivers for those 79 that
just aren't used (ie, /dev/audio0 which gets loaded along with dsp0.)
Conclusion: /dev sucks. =)
> First I will wait until the kernel becomes a bit more stable before I
> make any changes.
>
> However, I believe that devfs support will make things considerably
> simpler. Now you only need to worry about having a non-shared writable
> /var and /tmp as everything else can be read-only.
Oh yeah, I consider devfs nice on a workstation, but essential on a
small-space system where even 512 bytes per inode is too much space used.
--
Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org> Free software developer
<netgod> you know
<netgod> its really sad when the internic itself cant configure DNS
servers right
<netgod> it just doesnt get any more pathetic than that
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