I want a devfs so that I can have the kernel tell the outside world what
devices exist. For things like ptys, I don't particularly care about
a devfs -- the existing scheme is sufficient -- but for serial,
parallel, ide, and scsi devices I'd much rather mount a magic
filesystem instead of having to root through /proc/kmsg to find out
what the kernel actually found (and, also, I remember the joy of
chasing after minor numbers for secondary and tertiary IDE devices
after the first few alphas of WebShield fell over laughing
hysterically on IDE boxes; for this, having devfs actually TELL me
what the major and minor numbers are is A Good Thing, because then
I can have these numbers change in the future without hilarious
consequences.)
Not using devfs wouldn't help here, unless I wanted to have my bootup
process boot the machine with a devfs kernel, do an ls on the devfs
filesystem, then reboot with a non-devfs kernel to interpret the
results and properly populate /dev
>> david parsons \bi/ Working, intermittently, on his own devfs.
>
>When will it be ready?
Sometime between february and hell freezing over; I made the horrible
mistake of doing a first cut inside /proc, which doesn't have the
infrastructure I want (and hacking major and minor numbers into /proc
is, umm, icky, particularly when you're an applications programmer
like myself.) Now I actually have to learn how filesystems should
work instead of my traditional method of taking chainsaws to existing
code.
____
david parsons \bi/ It *did* nicely populate /proc/dev/sd*, even though
\/ that population was basically worthless.