Re: [gentoo-dev] Kernel sources thread

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Wed, 2004-07-21 at 06:34, Travis Tilley wrote:
> 1) udev is either ready or it isnt. the fact that you need to use a device
> tarball for entries udev doesnt support shows me that it isnt ready. what's
> the point of using a device management system if you're going to just dump a
> bunch of extra dev entries in there anyway? if udev were ready, this wouldnt
> be necessary.

Most of those drivers are not sysfs-aware and simply have not been
updated by the various authors.  Most of them are non-kernel modules,
such as VMware.

> 3) devfs isnt going away any time soon, and there will be people like me who
> dont think it's a good idea to risk bugs for no apparent benefit.

Perhaps the next stable kernel version, if what I've been reading holds
true.

> 4) it makes sense to keep supporting devfs even after it's ripped out of the
> kernel, which i think isnt until after the /next/ stable kernel series. since
> we still support 2.4 as the default (on a few archs anyways) i think even
> when it is ripped out, people will be using a kernel series that still has it
> for a -while-. if it werent for this tendency to not use the latest stable
> kernel, i wouldnt have had to move the 2.6 linux-headers into their own
> package just to support nptl properly on archs other than amd64.

Agreed, we will have to maintain support for some time to come.

> bah, i've been suckered into installing udev... so i might as well keep it
> until something breaks. i disabled the tarball hack since it was making /dev
> ugly and cluttered... though i admit it seems to be more ready than i thought
> it was. at least for now i can have both and always make devfs mount on
> boot... please dont think seriously about removing support for that. at least
> not until after we all move over to 2.10 anyways. :/

I find the flexibility it gives me to be much better than devfs, and I
enjoy having the "standard" Linux device naming that we're all used to
having from before devfs.  Currently, I use it to create custom /dev/
entries for specific pieces of hardware, like /dev/usbkey and
/dev/archos, along with the "standard" device nodes for those devices,
so I could setup hotplug.d with a script to automatically mount them
upon them being plugged into my machine.  I find it to be far superior
to using devfs+supermount, since there's nothing "fooling" the kernel
into thinking a device is always mounted.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering QA Manager/Games Developer
Gentoo Linux

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