Hi all,
I'd like to finally announce the previously vapor-ware udev program that
I've talked a lot about with a lot of people over the past months. The
first, very rough cut is at:
kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/hotplug/udev-0.1.tar.gz
But what is it? I've included an initial design document below that was
originally written by Dan Stekloff, and hacked up a bit by me. But in
short, udev is a userspace replacement for devfs. It will create and
destroy /dev entries based on the current system configuration. It does
this by watching the /sbin/hotplug events on the system, and reading
information about these events from sysfs.
Right now the program is only in 1 piece, not the 3 pieces that the
design document talks about, but it does work with the default Linux
/dev naming scheme that almost everyone uses. It can only work for
devices that create a dev file in sysfs, exposing their major/minor
number, so this is limited (currently only block and usb-serial devices
do this.)
If you want to test this with block devices, you will need the kobject
hotplug patches previously posted here for 2.5.67, which are also
available at:
kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/gregkh/misc/kobject-hotplug-?-2.5.67.patch
Anyway, this works for me, on my machines, and I am very interested in
feedback from everyone about both this concept, and the implementation
of this. I've cced a lot of different lists, as they have all expressed
interest in this project.
Yes, I know there's still a lot of work to do (serialization, symlinks,
hooking hotplug so that others can also use it, etc.) but it's a first
step :)
I'd like to thank Dan Stekloff for constantly badgering me about this
project and for writing lots of good design documentation, it is greatly
appreciated. Also, thanks to Pat Mochel for coming up with sysfs which
allows this project to be able to work at all.
thanks,
greg k-h
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