Re: [Sheflug] Unknown device / DevFS

["Chris J" <xxxxx [at] xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 
> What's the joy of devFS?
> 
> I thought it was a bit of a development/experimental system?
> 

It is (according the config stuff its marked EXPERIMENTAL), but it does 
something that's rather useful (at least as far as I understand devfs seeing 
as I've never used it) ... cuts the crud from /dev. I do ask (okay I have 
slack and other distributions will vary, but...) how many people here are 
likely to use /dev/isdnctrl4 through to /dev/isdnctrl63 ... or /dev/vcs* 
(anyone any idea what/dev/vcs0 onwards are?) ... or maybe you have enough IDE 
controllers to have a /dev/hde* through to /dev/hdh* ... and what the hell is 
/dev/profile*, anyone ? I could go on, but you get the idea :)

For me most of this would go ... I'd have a smattering of /dev/hd*, a 
/dev/sd0 and /dev/sd1 for CD-ROM and -RW, the pty's and tty's, lp and the 
sound stuff and finally the bttv stuff, but that's it. A server would just 
have the disks (SCSI and/or IDE) and the terminals[1]. In essence 80% of /dev 
is useless to most people. "ls | wc -l" tells me that there are 1972 files in 
/dev.

/dev is a ridiculous huge directory ... it always has been (on all UNIXes). 
Solaris tries to have some vauge form of a dynamic /dev directory with its 
/devices ... everything under /dev is a symlink to something under /devices.

Now assuming I've not got hold of wrong end of stick about what devfs can do, 
it's a great idea in theory. I've not actually played with devfs though yet. 
My current toy is enabling S/Key authentication :)
 
If I /have/ got wrong end of stick, could someone hit me with it?[2]

Chris...[3]

[1] /dev/null, /dev/random, /dev/urandom and /dev/zero are common over 
everything...
[2] Ooo-er matron
[3] not long back from pub
-- 
\ Chris Johnson           \
 \ cej [at] nccnet.co.uk        \
  \ www.nccnet.co.uk/~cej/  ~-----------------------------------------,
   \ Redclaw chat - http://redclaw.org.uk - telnet redclaw.org.uk 2000 \____


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