Re: Devfs, was Re: Migrating to larger numbers

Richard Gooch (rgooch@atnf.csiro.au)
Thu, 10 Jun 1999 00:33:06 +1000

Brendan Cully writes:
> Is anybody else using ALSA? Because devfs is such a horrible idea, they have
> decided to create a bunch of device nodes in /proc:
>
> xanadu:~$ ls -l /proc/asound/dev
> total 0
> crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 116, 0 Jun 9 10:18 controlC0
> crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 116, 8 Jun 9 10:18 midiC0D0
> crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 116, 4 Jun 9 10:18 mixerC0D0
> crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 116, 16 Jun 9 10:18 pcmC0D0
> crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 116, 17 Jun 9 10:18 pcmC0D1
> crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 116, 33 Jun 9 10:18 timer
> xanadu:~$

Puke!

> these are of course dynamically created based on what devices the sound
> driver has detected. To use them, symlinks are supposed to be created in
> dev(!). So instead of device nodes that can't be opened, we just have
> dangling symlinks :(
>
> Maybe the SCSI subsystem should dynamically create devices in
> /proc/scsi/<controller>/<bus>/ too?
>
> What I mean is, if ALSA is going to become a standard part of the
> kernel, devfs would be a nice companion, so that we could avoid
> moving /dev into an already somewhat ridiculous /proc filesystem.

I agree. I would like to see the eventual migration of non-process
related stuff to /dev instead. It looks to me that people have chucked
stuff into /proc because it was convenient and there wasn't an
alternative.

Regards,

Richard....

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