Re: RFC: Starting a stable kernel series off the 2.6 kernel

From: Bill Davidsen
Date: Tue Dec 06 2005 - 09:59:00 EST


Greg KH wrote:
On Sun, Dec 04, 2005 at 04:46:31AM +0000, Luke-Jr wrote:

Well, devfs does have some abilities udev doesn't: hotplug/udev
doesn't detect everything, and can result in rarer or non-PnP devices
not being automatically available;


Are you sure about that today? And udev wasn't created to do everything
that devfs does. And devfs can't do everything that udev can (by
far...)


devfs has the effect of trying to load a module when a program looks
for the devices it provides-- while it can cause problems, it does
have a possibility to work better.


Sorry, but that model of loading modules is very broken and it is good
that we don't do that anymore (as you allude to.)


Interesting effects of switching my desktop from devfs to udev:
1. my DVD burners are left uninitialized until I manually modprobe ide-cd or (more recently) ide-scsi


Sounds like a broken distro configuration :)


2. my sound card is autodetected and the drivers loaded, but the OSS emulation modules are omitted; with devfs, they would be autoloaded when an app tried to use OSS


Again, broken distro configuration :)

If a new udev config is needed with every new kernel, why isn't it in
the kernel tarball? Is that what you mean by "broken distro
configuration?" The info should be in /proc or /sys and not in an
external config file, particularly if a different versions per-kernel is
needed and people are trying new kernels and perhaps falling back to the
old.

Have "make install" drop the udev config in /boot like the initrd file.
The the boot could create an slink to "/boot/$(uname -r)-udev" or some such.

--
-bill davidsen (davidsen@xxxxxxx)
"The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the
last possible moment - but no longer" -me

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