Re: State of devfs in 2.6?

[Andreas Jellinghaus]

On Mon, 08 Dec 2003 15:50:45 +0000, William Lee Irwin III wrote:
> I would say it's deprecated at the very least. sysfs and udev are
> supposed to provide equivalent functionality, albeit by a somewhat
> different mechanism.

huh?

aj@simulacron:/dev$ find -type c -mount |grep -v pty |wc -l
    164
aj@simulacron:/dev$ find -type b |wc -l
    157
aj@simulacron:/dev$ find /sys/ -name dev |wc -l
    250

After ignoring .devfsd we are left with 70 devices missing:
 - 15 floppy devices
 - 5 input/ devices
 - full, kmem, kmsg, mem, null, port, random, urandom, zero
 - printers/0 
 - 5 misc/ devices
 - 12 snd/ devices
 - 5 sound/ devices
 - 18 vcc/ devices

I wouldn't call udev deprecated, unless a newer kernel has the
essential devices, too. And is there a udev version that can
do devfs names? last time I checked only lanana names were supported.

Some distributions were quite happy to move from /dev and lanana to
devfs with better names. I doubt everyone will rush to udev with
lanana names, and re-introducing makedev for devices not represented
in sysfs doesn't sound very nice either. So 2.8.* might be a nice time
frame for dropping devfs, or at least give sysfs and udev a few months
to catch up on the issues mentioned.

Andreas

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