Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 23:14:26 -0600
From: Richard Gooch <rgooch@ras.ucalgary.ca>
> While I'm at it, here are my comments on /devfs. I feel it's actually
> something we should have because of the inode management problems (too many
> of them in that /dev directory, slow seek time, etc.), but I don't feel the
> way it was implemented was a very good idea--
>
> The current /devfs method forces all user-level programs to be
> rewritten to use the new format, i.e. changing say /dev/tty10 to
> /devfs/tty/10. This also causes the potential problem that new
> programs will be written only for /devfs and not maintain
> compatibility with the old /dev structure.
My original devfs patch had what you wanted: the old names were
preserved. Linus mandated that the old names would not appear in the
kernel. So instead, I updated devfsd which can automatically create
the old names.
A number of people thought devfs was a bad idea. It went in, anyway,
during feature freeze, because Linus was God.
The reason why I dislike devfs is precisely demonstrated by a lot of
people kvetching with the namespace. It causes policy to be dictated in
the kernel; in this case Linus single-handedly dictated the new naming
convention, and now everyone has to live with it. Of course, it's *his*
kernel, so he has the right to do this, even if it causes a lot of
people pain and annoyance. Personally, it'll be interesting to see how
many distributions actually ship with devfs turned on, or with devfs
mounted somewhere else, like /devfs.
A number of user utilities, such as e2fsprogs, need modification to work
well with a mandatory devfs with the new names. I don't plan to do that
work right away, since I have other higher priority items to worry
about. So if any distributions do ship with devfs, they *will* have to
ship with devfsd. Perhaps some of them will simply decide to not ship
with devfs at all. (It after all is still marked as experimental.)
- Ted
P.S. Can we at least *please* chance all occurances of "disc" to "disk"
in the publically visible devfs namespace? The kernel uses American
english everywhere else, and having a mixture of British and American
english is just going to cause massive confusion.
-
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