Managing dynamic device naming

Managing dynamic device naming

I've always been on the side that claims devfs works well. There's a few persistance-related things I don't care for, but overall it seems to be a good solution. One thing I've always thought would be nice is multiple dev filesystems union on top of each other. You could boot with a basic devfs that had your console and such, and then mount devfs over the top of that with whatever union policy was used.

That still doesn't take care of ownership and permissions, but it could eliminate the tarball mess and perhaps even reduce the duties of the daemon.

What I'd really like to know is when we'll have union mounts. Last I checked the kernel code, they weren't supported. We don't need to be fancy about it, like the last time I saw someone making excuses for why the community hadn't done it yet. Union mounts would be tremendously helpful in many areas. My pet favorite is union mounting a microdrive over the top of a skeleton root filesystem on my iPaq.

-Paul Komarek