A devfs will tell you just what hardware is on the system (for
supported drivers); it's a bit easier to autoconfigure serial
devices, for instance, when you can just check to see if they're
in /devices instead of either (a) blindly poking away at them
and discarding all the error messages (even if they're useful)
or (b) digging through the output of /proc/kmsg [my current
scheme on my research distribution] and configuring based on
what it says.
( for x in /devices/ttyS*;do
setserial $x autoconfig auto_irq
done
is nicer than poking away at proc/kmsg)
____
david parsons \bi/ ptys? Oh, pooh on them.
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