Re: DEVFS is very good compared to UDEV

[Ian Kent]

On Tue, 23 Dec 2003, Jari Soderholm wrote:

> 
> Booting kernel is faster compared to UDEV.

Mmm. Doesn't seem that way to me. What have I missed?

> 
> UDEV otherwise is very complex for average user and it
> is definetly much slower , it has much greater chance
> for errors because very complicated scrips which seem 
> to need many different gnu commandline utilities.

Didn't seem to difficult to me when I checked out both systems this last 
few days. In fact I like'em both.

> 
> It is quite funny that when DEVFS creates device files
> automagically and in the ram-memory, some people want
> to go backwards, and use shell scripts to 
> create those files on hard disk, and then it is technically better solution.

Some how I don't think that's the reason for that statement.

> 
> If one you look at the /sysfs-directory there are
> device filenames, (but not the actual devicefiles), so
> it does same thing that DEVFS, but actually much worce
> way, it created devicefilenames in the ram, but
> one cannot use them, because they are not devicefiles.

Looks to me like that was never the aim of sysfs. I haven't checked into 
sysfs yet but I suspect it is quite different to devfs.

> 
> Why could you develop it so that UDEV could create those
> actual device files there also, then most linux
> users would not need those horrible scipts anymore.
> All that is then needed link from /sysfs to /dev dir.

That would take away the ability to have a changeable device naming 
scheme. One of the main reasons for having dynamic device name mapping 
system is to map the names from a device detection system to specified 
(possibly changing) naming scheme.

Please don't get me wrong. I like devfs very much and I see it has come a 
long way since I last used it, but it needs work just to maintain its 
current functionality within 2.6.

Ian


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