The kernel devfs will be depricated with 2.6 and most likley completely removed in 2.7+, we should probably start work on moving to another system as soon as possible, the reccommended implementation is udev, a userspace version of devfs. It can be downloaded from http://kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/hotplug/ Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:
Article reference? Even if it is not going to be deprecated, udev is a welcome alternative for those who shudder at "experimental" kernel components.
The article isn't up quite yet, I learned that devfs is depricated at the Ottawa Linux Symposium, Greg Kroah-Hartman gave a talk about udev, and asked if any Gentoo people were here, and told us that devfs is depricated and he would probably be taking it out for 2.7. The article should be on linuxsymposium.org within a few days.
You mean this article? http://archive.linuxsymposium.org/ols2003/Proceedings/All-Reprints/Reprint-Kroah-Hartman-OLS2003.pdf I saw it earlier today when I searched for udev. Doesn't mention deprecation... But I see no reason to not move to a superior solution... Yet, it seems that udev needs sysfs, which is not present in the 2.4 series.
Yeah, that's the article, he did a talk about it here. udev looks very cool and it will probably avoid some of the flakiness of devfs. True that it requires sysfs, but it would not be too hard to do a check in the initscripts, maybe something like this: if [ -z `uname -r | grep -E "2.[6-9]{1}` ]; then <mount devfs> else <start udev> fi possibly add an extra check for devfs in the kernel or have some method of specifying that we are using udev rather than devfs, possibly a rc.conf option or something.
something like this might work too, if we want to be more sure we have sysfs if [ -z `grep sysfs /proc/mounts` ]; then <mount devfs> else <start udev> fi the only problem with this is that i'm not sure whether we have sysfs mounted before we try to mount the devfs or not. we could also do a check if the devfs mount fails, then try to mount sysfs if it does, failing both output an error about devfs not found or sysfs not found if we are on a 2.6+ kernel.
Another thing - this applies to all architectures that we are suing devfs on, not just x86 (i noticed its assigned to x86-kernel)
A kind of old yet interesting article that touches on udev and devfs is at http://lwn.net/Articles/15425/ & http://lwn.net/Articles/15428/
it would be pretty sweet that, as soon as udev becomes a reality, we switch to it ... imo, it'd be seen the same way as how require devfs ... we support the latest and greatest technologies to make the end linux experience better
Devfs is unusable for the new SELinux API that was accepted into the linus tree. So if we can get udev going, then that'd be nicer than a pile of unused device nodes in /dev.
Nabbing this. I have been following this issue on LMKL, and looked at libsysfs (if remember correctly), etc, but I have not yet done anything explicitly. This is however on my todo list, and like irqbalance/sysfs will be supported before too long.
Will be in baselayout-1.8.6.11 soonish.
