Messages in this thread | | | From | (H. Peter Anvin) | Subject | Re: Flexible Console open (really little patch) | Date | 21 Aug 1998 00:15:11 GMT |
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Followup to: <Pine.LNX.4.00.9808210700380.16779-100000@stoli.spirits.org.au> By author: Nathan Hand <nathanh@chirp.com.au> In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel > > The solution is to keep /dev as a normal UNIX filesystem, with normal > storage on disk, then nodes are entirely persistent across reboots. > > Then devfs gets replaced by a user space daemon "devd" with some sort > of communication to a kernel module "kdev". > > Any kernel changes are reported by kdev to devd. The devd then erases > and creates /dev nodes using nothing more intelligent than unlink and > mknod. Devd can perhaps discover needed nodes once, when starting. > > The only loss from this system is you can't autoload a module just by > accessing its (non-existant) /dev entry. I am not sure this is really > an issue: the discover phase should do this in user space anyway, and > I think it's confusing that "ls /dev" won't show an entry for devices > you actually do have, as happens with the current system. > > As far as I can tell, this solution addresses all the problems people > have with bloat, persistence, strange new filesystems, missing nodes, > races, weird changes to modprobe, putting policy in kernel, etc. It's > also possible to get a Solaris-like system by starting devd up, using > it once, then killing it. > > Are there any serious objections to this proposal? If not, I'll start > coding it up this weekend as an alternative to devfs. >
I think this is exactly the way to go, and is effectively what the PCMCIA cardmgr does.
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