From: Luke-Jr <luke-jr@utopios.org>
To: Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: RFC: Starting a stable kernel series off the 2.6 kernel
Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2005 04:46:31 +0000
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On Sunday 04 December 2005 00:20, Greg KH wrote:
> > Switch "broken bloaty bulky devfs" to "lean & clean devfs"?  This ship
> > would have been flying the "clean-up nation" flags.
>
> Again, because an in-kernel devfs is not the correct thing to do.  devfs
> has been disabled for a few months now, and I don't think anyone has
> missed it yet :)

Well, devfs does have some abilities udev doesn't: hotplug/udev doesn't detect 
everything, and can result in rarer or non-PnP devices not being 
automatically available; devfs has the effect of trying to load a module when 
a program looks for the devices it provides-- while it can cause problems, it 
does have a possibility to work better. Interesting effects of switching my 
desktop from devfs to udev:
1. my DVD burners are left uninitialized until I manually modprobe ide-cd or 
(more recently) ide-scsi
2. my sound card is autodetected and the drivers loaded, but the OSS emulation 
modules are omitted; with devfs, they would be autoloaded when an app tried 
to use OSS
devfs also has the advantage of keeping the module info all in one place-- the 
kernel or the module. In particular, with udev the detection and /dev info is 
scattered into different locations of the filesystem. This can probably be 
fixed easily simply by having udev read such info from modules or via a /sys 
entry, though.
-- 
Luke-Jr
Developer, Utopios
http://utopios.org/
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