From: Richard Gooch <rgooch@ras.ucalgary.ca>
H. Peter Anvin writes:
> The second is that devfs seems to think it is above the normal way of
> doing things (unlike ALL OTHER filesystems, including procfs and
> shmfs) and not only will mount itself on /dev automatically, but will
> do so *by default*. This is incredibly antisocial behaviour, and has
> no justification. If there are conditions under which you would need
> devfs before you have mount(8) available -- which I do not believe is
> ever the case -- it may be justifiable to have it as an option, but
> making it default behaviour is pretty much unacceptable. Use
> /etc/fstab like everything else, please.
No, it's not antisocial.
I think I agree with hpa.
You claim:
ALSO NOTE that if you do enable devfs, the defaults are such that full
compatibility is maintained with the old devices names.
But reality is different.
People who enable devfs quickly find out that their system is broken
and that they have to run a daemon to repair it.
Many will prefer not to enable devfs at all.
Enabling it in the kernel should make power available to people
who desire to use it. It should not kill well-functioning systems.
So (i) enabling devfs should not cause an automatic mount,
and (ii) the canonical mount point should be /devfs, not /dev.
It was done for good reason. Before I even
consider changing the default, I want someone to fix init/main:init()
so it doesn't do:
if (open("/dev/console", O_RDWR, 0) < 0)
printk("Warning: unable to open an initial console.\n");
instead it should talk to the console driver directly.
I do not understand your problem.
Andries
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Mar 31 2000 - 21:00:22 EST