[gentoo-dev] Suggestion for getting rid of udev

[Walter Dnes]

Hi all

  Recently, there was a firestorm on the gentoo-user list over the idea
that udev would eventually require /usr to be on the same physical
parition as /, or else use initramfs, which is its own can of worms. I'm
not a programmer, let alone a developer.  Rather than merely ranting, I
went and searched for an alternative.

  Forking udev is probably not an option.  The udev lead developer is a
Redhat employee, and his direction seems to be to drag everybody in
Redhat's direction.  Our community doesn't have Redhat's billions.

  The other option is to drop udev entirely.  As an example, I suggest
looking at Alpine Linux http://alpinelinux.org/  It's a lightweight
server-oriented distro.  It uses busybox's mdev instead of udev, and
some other mdev substitutes in place of standard packages.  It uses
openrc.  Furthermore, "previous versions of Alpine were based on Gentoo"
as per http://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Creating_an_Alpine_package so
there should be no problem with us borrowing back from Alpine.

  The only reason Alpine isn't usuable for regular users right now is
that it's built with uclibc, which will break closed-source binary blobs
(e.g. Flash and Acrobat and many video card drivers).  I'm not a
developer or programmer, so correct me if I'm wrong, but it shouldn't be
difficult to replace uclibc with the standard library, and build away.

  Another option is to take the current Gentoo setup, drop udev and
use mdev in the same manner as Alpine uses it.  In case anyone asks,
auto mounting should still be possible.  Attached is an excerpt from
/var/log/messages from a basic Alpine install.  The kernel messages were
generated when I inserted a USB key into a usb jack.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@××××××××.org>