> 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.
Actually AIX does not have a devfs. The boot process loads a ramdisk with
loadable device drivers and their user level helper programs (define and
configure methods). The helper methods are responsible for bus traversal
and finding child devices as well as resolving address conflicts. These
helper methods also create /dev nodes using mknod after having loaded the
kernel module (major device numbers are allocated dynamically). Upon
finding and mounting the root device the ramdisk version of /dev is merged
with the on disk version. The unload helper methods are responsible for
removing the device nodes after unloading the kernel module.
All this is controlled by a database named ODM, which is in binary format
and thus hated by Unix purists that only accept textual config files. But
this ODM is also responsible for the convenient feature of AIX that you
can even move disks between scsi buses and they keep their /dev name, very
handy.
-- Jens-Uwe Mager <pgp-mailto:62CFDB25>