Improving ext4: bigalloc, inline data, and metadata checksums

Posted Dec 2, 2011 23:40 UTC (Fri) by walex (guest, #69836)
In reply to: Improving ext4: bigalloc, inline data, and metadata checksums by alankila
Parent article: Improving ext4: bigalloc, inline data, and metadata checksums

As to udev some people dislike smarmy shysters who replace well designed working subsystems seemingly for the sole reason of making a political landgrab, because the replacement has both more kernel complexity and more userland complexity and less stability.

The key features of devfs were that it would populate automatically /dev from the kernel with basic device files (major, minor) and then use a very simple userland daemon to add extra aliases as required.

It turns out that after several attempts to get it to work udev adds to /sys from inside the kernel exactly the same information, so there has been no migration of functionality from kernel to userspace:

$ ls -ld /dev/tty9
crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 9 2011-11-28 14:03 /dev/tty9
$ cat /sys/class/tty/tty9/dev
4:9

And the userland part is also far more complex and unstable than devfsd ever was (for example devfs did not require cold start).

And udev is just the most shining example of a series of similar poor decisions (which however seem to have been improving a bit with time).

Improving ext4: bigalloc, inline data, and metadata checksums

Posted Dec 3, 2011 3:16 UTC (Sat) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm not sure that is an accurate portrayal of what happened, on this planet at least. My recollection from the time is that there were fundamental technical problems with the devfs implementation which is why it was redone into udev. I think those problems were some inherent race conditions on device add/removal, plus concerns about how much policy about /dev file names, permissions, etc was hard coded into the kernel and unmodifyable by an end user or sysadmin. That is just my recollection.

Improving ext4: bigalloc, inline data, and metadata checksums

Posted Dec 3, 2011 11:07 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The latter is doubly ironic now that udev forbids you from changing the names given to devices by the kernel. (You can introduce new names, but you can't change the kernel's anymore.)

Improving ext4: bigalloc, inline data, and metadata checksums

Posted Dec 3, 2011 4:04 UTC (Sat) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link]

To your specific example: obviously the kernel is going to have some kind of (generated) name for a device, and to know the major/minor number pair which is the very thing that faciliates the communication between userspace and kernel... But udev is still controlling things like permissions and aliases for those devices where necessary.