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From
SubjectRe: Flexible Console open (really little patch)
Date
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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