What's to become of devfs?

Posted Nov 21, 2002 17:52 UTC (Thu) by MLKahnt (guest, #6642)
Parent article: What's to become of devfs?

I roll my own kernels on Debian, and started building devfs with kernel 2.4.5, although it wasn't until 2.4.9 that I got those kernels to successfully boot - I didn't read closely enough that I'd also need devfsd (oops!) Since then, I've used it and found it wonderful as I tried to get a couple ornery extensions working (tv tuner, usb camera, usb printer) - if I couldn't find the device, obviously something wasn't *quite* right. Traditional /dev wouldn't have given me that opportunity, and I find that I can check it with fewer keystrokes than I can /proc. This *trimmed down* /dev actually means that you can find things - and on a large xterm, can see all of /dev itself on the screen at once. The replacement suggested might handle this just as well or better, but simply put, it is a fine part of the system and a great benefit from my experience, and I suspect that it is more useful for most users than the kernel http server.