Managing dynamic device naming [LWN.net]

Managing dynamic device naming

Posted Apr 17, 2003 13:35 UTC (Thu) by ken (subscriber, #625)
Parent article: Managing dynamic device naming

This is hopeless people will never agree how this should be done.
Personally I thought the issue would go away when Richard got
devfs in but apparently not.

Is it really a problem that the name of the device is set by the kernel?
It's not like you can name them anything you want anyway they better be
static or users would go nuts.

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Managing dynamic device naming

Posted Apr 17, 2003 17:12 UTC (Thu) by cpeterso (guest, #305) [Link] (1 responses)

since no one will ever agree on the proper naming scheme, I think pushing the naming policy to userland makes sense. There is only one "official" Linux kernel, so someone will always be upset with a kernel naming policy. In userland, there can be infinite competition for udev-like projects. Sounds good to me!

The kernel should implement mechanism, not policy.

Managing dynamic device naming

Posted Apr 18, 2003 23:43 UTC (Fri) by wolfrider (guest, #3105) [Link]

> In userland, there can be infinite competition for udev-like projects. Sounds good to me!

"Are you brain-dead?!" You *want* your devices to be named consistently across distros, you know.

--How about a "limited devfs" where only the types of devices that NEED lots of space (disks) have to go thru it?

Managing dynamic device naming

Posted Apr 17, 2003 18:42 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

One important aspect of the device naming problem is that it isn't uniform. There are a number of devices which are completely standard (e.g., /dev/null). There are a number where the permissions don't need to be persistent, because they will be set when the device is opened (ttyp*). There are a number of symlinks. There are a few things that aren't devices but are in /dev (initctl, log). There are a few cases where there are a ton of nodes which follow a pattern (fd*, partitions of disks).

This all means that it's easy to find an entry that justifies just about any idea, but hard to find a design that fits all of the behaviours desired even for the current set of devices.