The future of device numbers [LWN.net]

The future of device numbers

Posted Jan 8, 2004 17:36 UTC (Thu) by holstein (subscriber, #6122)
Parent article: The future of device numbers

Sorry to show my complete ignorance of the matter, but who exactly will remain, in a 2.6 world, as the devfs users, if udev is the default solution used by the kernel?

Does that means that there will still be distributions using it? Or perhaps embeded systems users? Is it because there not enough tools built around udev?

Thanks for any light on this!

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The future of device numbers

Posted Jan 8, 2004 18:37 UTC (Thu) by set (guest, #4788) [Link]

The kernel really doesnt care what you use; you can have a static
/dev directory filled with ordinary device files, or if your kernel
has devfs support configured in, you can optionally mount devfs over
/dev, and use that. Additionally, if your kernel has, IIRC, hotplug
and sysfs configured in, you could optionally use udev.

In other words, what you use is a mater of choice, or more likely
the choice of your distribution. (eg. Gentoo likes to use devfs,
but you dont _have_ to.) However, when they say that devfs is
deprecated, it means someday they will rip out that code, and then
choosing devfs will be harder;)

(as an example, currently, I run Gentoo, with a 2.6 kernel, and use
devfs. a friend of mine does the same, except no devfs, just a
static /dev directory.)