Re: USB device allocation

Zack Weinberg (zack@bitmover.com)
Tue, 05 Oct 1999 16:20:05 -0700


Jeff Garzik wrote:
> David Weinehall wrote:
> > Oh, and have you actually ever tried a system running devfs (such as a
> > kernel patched with Richard Gooch' patch, or a Solaris-system), or?
>
> Is Solaris dynamic? I'm pretty sure 'boot -r' or creating
> /etc/reconfigure causes a boot script to scan the hardware and creates
> device nodes as needed. That's an entirely userland solution which
> keeps /dev nice and trim.

Yes, Solaris does effectively this.

The scripts it uses are extremely fragile and have this nasty tendency
to believe a previous /devices instead of the hardware probe; worse,
you have to be able to mount /usr before they can run. I'm sure that
equivalent functionality could be implemented in a more robust
fashion, however.

You'd have to have some way of getting the device list out of the
kernel in the first place - I don't think we have that yet.

zw

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