What's to become of devfs?

Posted Nov 14, 2002 7:59 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
Parent article: What's to become of devfs?

> Despite the fact that devfs has been in the 2.4 kernel since it first
> shipped, very few distributions are turning it on for their customers.

Mandrake Linux, a very popular distro, has had devfs activated
by default at least since version 8.2 (possibly earlier, but of
8.2 I'm quite sure since I use it). Thus this feature has a
non-trivial number of customers, even if it is not enabled in
most distros.

What's to become of devfs?

Posted Nov 14, 2002 11:44 UTC (Thu) by csawtell (guest, #986) [Link]

Gentoo uses it, so I use it. It works well. Please don't take it away.

What's to become of devfs?

Posted Nov 15, 2002 3:04 UTC (Fri) by melauer (guest, #2438) [Link] (2 responses)

Also, note that Debian is still on kernel 2.2, which means that devfs isn't even an option for that distro.

debian only has kernel 2.2.x ??

Posted Nov 16, 2002 13:17 UTC (Sat) by ernest (guest, #2355) [Link] (1 responses)

Hu ? I use Debian, it has all the kernels you wish.

You don't need to stick with the one that is installed first, Debian provides packages with the latest and greatest kernels. Including many packages that provided exotic patches not in the mainstream kernel.

and I'm talking stable, not necessarely unstable or testing.

debian only has kernel 2.2.x ??

Posted Nov 25, 2002 3:34 UTC (Mon) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]

Yes, but they can't enable devfs by default, they have to use plain /dev. If all they shipped with 2.4, or at least if they shipped 2.4 as the default with no 2.2 install option, they could enable devfs by default.