Re: [Sheflug] Unknown device / DevFS

[Will Newton <xxxxx [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sunday 02 Dec 2001 11:28 pm, you wrote:

> 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 :)

It's main appeal is to those with very large or very small systems. On very 
large systems it breaks the dependence on major/minor numbers so for example 
you can have a ludicrous number of discs, which is very useful if you run a 
distributed cluster for example. On very small systems you can have a very 
small /dev and so save some (a little) memory. It also allows you to deal 
with read-only root filesystems (again, think embedded) as you can write to 
/dev without actually having to change on-disk structures. devfsd allows you 
to do some pretty spiffy things like loading a module when you access a 
device, so devices appear on demand, it can also manage your device 
permissions with regexps etc.

It seems to be fairly controversial in the kernel community, although whether 
that is due to the implementation, the implementor or the actual idea is hard 
to tell.
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