Re: [GIT PATCH] Remove devfs from 2.6.17

[H. Peter Anvin]

Samuel Thibault wrote:
> There has been at least my complaint about udev not being able to
> auto-load modules on /dev entry lookup (28th March 2006):
>
> « Given a freshly booted linux box, hence uinput is not loaded (why
> would it be, it doesn't drive any real hardware) ; what is the right
> way(tm) for an application to have the uinput module loaded, so that it
> can open /dev/input/uinput for emulating keypresses?
>
> - With good-old static /dev, we could just open /dev/input/uinput
>   (installed by the distribution), and thanks to a
>   alias char-major-10-223 uinput
>   line somewhere in /etc/modprobe.d, uinput gets auto-loaded.
>
> - With devfs, it doesn't look like it works (/dev/misc/uinput is not
>   present and opening it just like if it existed doesn't work). But I
>   read in archives that it could be feasible.
>
> - With udev, this just cannot work. As explained in an earlier thread,
>   even using a special filesystem that would report the opening attempt
>   to udevd wouldn't work fine since udevd takes time for creating the
>   device, and hence the original program needs to be notified ; this
>   becomes racy.

It would be nice if udev could be fed not just from the kernel, but from 
the repository of modules that are available for loading.  That may 
require additional module information.

	-hpa
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