Devfs was declared obsolete today in the 2.6-test kernel!?!

toon

Hi,

The subject says it all.
A few minutes ago I read a posting from Christoph Helwig
in the linux-kernel mailing list, in which he published a patch
for the 2.6-test kernel that declared devfs obsolete. In general,
most of the leading kernel developers want it to go, or so it appears.

Question: Gentoo uses devfs. What are the plans for the
2.6 kernel? Moving away from devfs? Are we maybe going to
adopt the userspace alternative that Greg Kroah Hartman
is working on?

Regards,
Toon.

zhenlin · Veteran Joined: 09 Nov 2002 Posts: 1361

http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25292

Looks like official confirmation to me.

toon · Posted: Sat Aug 16, 2003 3:47 pm Post subject:

wol · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 02 Jun 2002 Posts: 107

Anyone know what we need to do to prep our current boxes?

Lovechild · Posted: Sun Aug 17, 2003 7:34 am Post subject:

devfs needs to die and be replaced with udev - which is "the correct way" to do it.

devfs is likely to be the most horrible piece of code in the kernel - it's bloated, ugly and errorprone. Even with the recent cleanups it's just icky.

/me is a big fan of udev, dbus and hotplug

wol · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 02 Jun 2002 Posts: 107

Ignoring the fact that even Greg K-H says that version 0.2 has rough edges, memory leaks, etc, I thought I would try it out (in the interest of giving myself an excuse to backup all data). In the README file for udev-0.2, there are at least two lines I don't understand.

1. change the define on UDEV_ROOT from
#define UDEV_ROOT "/udev/"

"as I doubt you really want device nodes to be created in my home directory"

I don't see /udev/ as pointing in any home directory. Wouldn't this be just under the root directory?

2. "Point /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug at the location of the udev binary that is created."

Point? If I cat /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug, I get back

/sbin/hotplug

/sbin/hotplug looks for scripts in /etc/hotplug/

I'm confused by the terminology "Point". Reading the overview in the docs/ doesn't help me. Can someone enlighten me .
_________________
Intellectual dishonesty is a mortal sin.

invaderzim · Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2003 1:12 am Post subject:

echo /path/to/udev/binary/created > /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug

thubble · Posted: Sun Aug 31, 2003 8:58 pm Post subject:

Before I install udev, I'd like to know a few things. (The documentation isn't very detailed)...

1.) Is this compatible enough with devfs that it won't completely hose the system with missing device nodes?
2.) What's the best thing to change UDEV_ROOT to? If I set it to /dev would it interact seamlessly with the filesystem or would it screw things up?

If anyone can answer this, I'd greatly appreciate it.

rauar · n00b Joined: 15 Mar 2003 Posts: 37

greg_g · Retired Dev Joined: 02 Mar 2003 Posts: 180

Linus accepted the patch, now it's official...