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SubjectRe: My $0.02 on devd and devfs
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>>>>> "dp" == david parsons <orc@pell.portland.or.us> writes:

dp> ``Modern'' is not the word I'd use for the standard
dp> PC-style ports on an IBM PC clone.

Then let us not redesign device handling in order to support a bus
that is going away in a few years.

dp> When I load a kernel that doesn't have one of the farm of
dp> parallel drivers attached, the machine recognises the parallel
dp> port, but the kernel loads up blithely unaware that anything out
dp> of the ordinary is done.

That is the fault of the parallel port plug and play thingy then. It
should be able to recognize the attached devices. Even if that does
not work for parallel ports, I cannot really consider that in itself a
reason for devfs -- there is only one parallel port on most machines,
with at most 3 or 4 devices attached. The current solution (static
devices in an overpopulated /dev) works pretty well for parallel ports
anyway.

dp> Yes, in an environment where you either (a) speculatively
dp> load every possible driver to see what hardware is on the system,
dp> (b) don't use modules, or (c) put autoprobing for everything under
dp> the sun into the kernel.

Autoprobing IS already in the kernel for PCI, for instance.
/proc/bus/pci/devices contains all the devices on the PCI bus.
PCMCIA can list all connected cards without loading drivers, too. I
presume USB can, but I haven't tried it. IrDA can. The only exception
seems to be parallel ports.

dp> If the solution de jour to get rid of that icky devfs is
dp> one of these, I'll say that the cure is much much worse than the
dp> disease.

Certainly, but neither of the 3 options are needed, except for
parallel ports.


Benny


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