Re: devfs

["John L. Fjellstad" <john-debian@fjellstad.org>]

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On Sunday 16 November 2003 21:22, Todd Pytel wrote:

> I agree. I only had one or two issues with devfs, and those were really
> problems with other applications not being coded to recognize it.

I had some problems with devfs in connection with usb devices.  Whenever I
tried to mount a usb harddisk that wasn't properly supported, the whole
system would hang (to a point where you couldn't even ssh into the system,
and only a hard reboot would help).  From what I understand, if I hadn't run
devfs, the mount would just return with an error message.

> I gather that there was a lot of infighting about it on LKML, though.
> How much was politics and people, and how much was technical I don't
> know. Still, I think it could have taken off and been useful with more
> cooperation.

I think it was both political and technical.  Part of it was that devfs seems
to have had a lot of duplicate code.  And some people didn't like the idea of
having a system that was both kernel- and userspace.

It seems, though, that devfs hasn't been removed completely. I found this
website which explains the new functionality of Linux 2.4.6:
http://www.codemonkey.org.uk/post-halloween-2.5.txt
It's been deprecated, and probably will be removed by 2.7, but there is a 
replacement in something called udev.

- --
John L. Fjellstad____________________________________________________
web: http://www.fjellstad.org/          Quis custodiet ipsos custodes
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