It solves the problems I have with the existing black magic
system, which is that I want the kernel to tell me what devices
it has on it.
One of the things I do with Linux is to write my own distribution.
As part of this, I'm trying to build an installer that autodetects
as much of the system as it can. Currently I need to jump through a
lot of poorly-documented hoops to do this; for example, with a
devfs numerating the number of partitions on a system is a simple
case of trawling through /dev for the appropriate files, but if I
don't have devfs, I get chore of running ``fdisk -l'' and picking
the output apart.
Plus, for my memory detection code, I have workstations that use
linux 1.2.13 through the latest development kernels. Major number
creep makes it impossible to run all those kernel versions on the
same machine, unless I use devfs.
>- The implementation might not be up to snuff
The implementation of many things that go into the kernel may not
be up to snuff. By the time I'd tweaked my memory region allocator
code to suit Linus's tastes, I'd managed to break several boundary
conditions. Not too surprisingly, as soon as this code went into
the development kernels the patches materialized to fix most of those
problems, and people gave enough suggestions so I can fix some of
the others.
If devfs was in the kernel, more fingers would be available for
putting in a unionfs layer, and other enhancements (like
/dev/net/eth0...ethN for people who might want to iterate through
all the network devices on the machine, or /dev/pcmcia/socket0..
socketN so that pcmcia card services doesn't have to do horrible
hacks to create devices in /tmp [something which bit me when I
was writing the pcmcia part of my installer; pcmcia card services
wanted to write into /tmp, which I had linked into the install
disk so that Berkeley tar could write large scratch databases.
pcmcia card services ran before that, and bombed because /tmp
was pointing to never-there-was. With a devfs, card services
could avoid all this handwaving.]) could be added by motivated
hackers.
____
david parsons \bi/ I do tear out and replace hardware a lot.
\/
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