What's to become of devfs?

Posted Nov 14, 2002 6:18 UTC (Thu) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256)
Parent article: What's to become of devfs?

The problem with devfs is that it hasn't got the support of the rest
of the system. We need something like a translucent (overlay) filesystem
so that devfs can be mounted over /dev --- so the dynamic entries can
be used, and the system will fall through to the static device nodes
thereunder. (And some provision as to be made so that the permissions
ownership and now any ACLs or EAs (extended attributes) can be made to
to "show through."

I think these system changes (planned for 2.8 now anyway) will do away
with devfsd --- which seems like a kludge like kerneld did.

devfs is a good idea. However, it's a BIG change and will have to be
adopted slowly, probably will need more support (such as this unionfs
feature) and the implementation probably does need to be cleaned up.

I think combining devfs's dynamic model with the massive naming and
organizational chanages (/dev/hda becomes /dev/discs/disc0/disc *and*
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc) was a bad idea. It increases the
risk and aversion to adopting the new code as a standard.

We are seeking the "backwards" part of "backwards compatibility here.