[Gllug] SCSI and /dev

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Wed, 2004-03-03 at 12:21, Bruce Richardson wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 03, 2004 at 11:41:42AM +0000, Doug wrote:
> > On Wed 03 Mar Bruce Richardson wrote:
> > > You could try devfs, which has some flaws but does give you a /dev
> > > structure that reflects the kernel's internal device naming scheme.
> > 
> > udev is almost certainly a better bet:
> 
> Not at the moment, I think.  It's still lacks most of the useful
> functions of devfs.

Not according to it's author, who explicitly claims it can do everthing
that devfs can today. Now, I'll freely admit I've not used either of
them in earnest yet (though udev looks tempting), but what do you claim
devfs does that udev doesn't (except the modprobe on access stuff, which
is fundamentally flawed in unfixable ways, according to most of the
posts on linux kernel)?

>   While devfs has some known issues, it is still
> being maintained (if not by the original developer) and is stable for
> most purposes.  udev is still a beta project.

Yes, but as I understand it, devfs is definitely not going to remain, so
any effort invested in it at this point is likely to be a dead end
somewhere not too far down the line. Kernel list posts also claim it has
unsolvable race conditions, which can't be a good thing.

I've never really understood the urge to have a /dev with only valid
device nodes in it. I care *far* more about persistent device naming,
which udev offers, and devfs doesn't. In between SCSI disks, firewire
storage, and USB card readers, I can't use fstab mounting[1] for my
removable media. Running rescan-scsi-bus is a hack at best... The
presence of a few hundred device nodes, which do nothing, and probably
consume all of a few K of disk bothers me not at all. That said, I tend
to build kernels with the appropriate drivers built in, and not use
modules much anyway, so I might just be weird....

Mike.

[1] Yes, I could probably use hotplug, but that's not the point.

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug