Would a /proc/devices file which lists all devices also solve your
problems with the existing system?
I like the /proc/devices idea. It's relatively simple. It avoids a
lot of contentious ideas (permissions, not using VFS, mechanism vs
policy). Including /proc/devices will not impact /dev at all (thus
avoids persistence arguments).
But a /proc/devices will still let you have your autodetection and
let me have a dynamically changing /dev.
> 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.
HPA, would you be open to the idea of /proc/devices. This won't be
a terrific loss of functionality from the existing devfs.
--
Nathan Hand - Chirp Web Design - http://www.chirp.com.au/ - $e^{i\pi}+1 = 0$
Phone: +61 2 6230 1871 Fax: +61 2 6230 1515 E-mail: nathanh@chirp.com.au
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/