No, _you_ think it's a bad idea. Many people have wanted devfs
for a very long time. It has been coded up twice, including a
recent reincarnation as "SystemFS". It is in FreeBSD, Solaris,
and AIX. Linux wouldn't be alone at all.
Let's say it's a contraversial idea. Many people have wanted it, but a
lot of other people have thought it was an extremely dubious idea.
All problems can be solved. FreeBSD uses an invisible filesystem
that only the kernel can change. When you mount the filesystem,
you get something like a copy-on-write version of it.
I'd love for Linux to have a union mount capability. Anyone want to
volnteer ti write it?
Solaris seems to use tmpfs and loopback mounts, assisted by some
shell scripts. SystemFS uses a daemon to keep everything together.
As far as I can tell from a quick look, changes you make to /dev get
reported to the daemon for long-term non-volatile storage.
Solaris uses a number of different methods, indeed including a user
daemon which also handles automatically mounting and unmounting
filesystems. I do agree that a user daemon which automatically handles
mounting and unmounting filesystems is the right answer for that subset
of the problem.
There are a lot of people have said, "we want a devfs!"; however, it's
not clear to me at this point that a lot of kernel-side support is the
right answer. I'd suggest that someone start by trying to implement a
user-mode daemon that handled the problems by automatically creating the
devices in /dev by using mknod().
So ---- anybody want to bell the cat?
- Ted