Re: devfs vs udev FAQ from the other side

From: David Lang
Date: Wed Sep 14 2005 - 21:14:00 EST


On Wed, 14 Sep 2005, Robert Love wrote:

Took an actual devfs system of mine and disabled devfs from the
kernel, then enabled hotplug and sysfs for udev to run. make clean
and surprise surprise, kernel is much bigger. Enable netlink stuff and
it's bigger still. udev is only smaller if like Greg you don't count
its kernel components against it, even if they wouldn't otherwise need
to be enabled. Difference is to the tune of 604164 on udev and 588466
on devfs. Maybe not a lot in some people's books, but a huge
difference from the claims of other people that devfs is actually
bigger.

What modern system, though, could survive without hotplug and sysfs and
netlink? You need to have those components, you want those features,
anyhow.

most servers and embedded systems can survive just fine without hotplug (in fact hotplug is frequently the slowest part of the boot).

sysfs and netlink I would have to think about, I know I don't expliticitly use either very much, but I'd have to check to see what may use them that I don't think about.

David Lang

So your comparison is unrealistic.

Your user-space argument is better. Is ndevfs not sufficient?

Robert Love


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