Udev, thoughts, differences between distros and such.

[Klixxer]

I made the transition in Slack while upgrading to 10.0 and i have to say the info was really bad.

So i downloaded and installed Arch 0.6, using devfs, and the transition was transition here was a lot easier, actually it was completely transparant, if not for custom kernel needing reconfig for not including hotplug from the start (it messed up the 5336 Nvidia drivers) i wouldn't even have noticed.

Anywayz, thoughts on Udev? It seems to be here to stay but then again so did devfs.

If you are going into the transition, don't forget to edit your fstab, and usbdevfs is called usbfs (i would have pulled hair over that if i had any).

Any knowledge of which distros have taken the step would also be welcomed.

TIA

 

[drag]

Most kernel developers never liked DevFS. It was buggy, only a half-fix, and made things complicated. Or something like that. Lots of people despised it, but stuck it in there because it worked and was stable. Eventually the developer that started the whole thing just seemed to disapeer.

Personally I hated it. It was irritating and it made it a pain in the rear end to deal with permissions and groups.

Udev rocks. It's in userspace, the names are completely it's flexible, extendable, customizable. Everything that DevFS never was.

Plus with the addition of sysFS it will eventually replace the old school way of major and minor numbers hard coded into the kernel and make them dynamic. Or something like that. Herald a new way for Linux to handle hardware and make it easier to develop drivers for new hardware. Like the numerious USB devices we use. For instance it is now possible to write a driver for a USB device that exists completely in userspace.

Of course of all that udev is one part of it.

Imagine eventually you will be able to have servers with hundreds of cheap IDE disks in arrays without having to worry about running out of minor/major numbers to assign to all of them. Imagine being able to have developers create a abratrary /dev/ name for whatever device they want without worrying about stepping on any other people's toes.

Also be able to get Windows-quality or better hardware detection to were you plug in a new device, say a Handycam into a firewire port, and have your OS detect it, and send a signal to your Desktop and open a movie editor with camera controls that would be put into control of the camera from the getgo. The first time, and with no prompting from you. Or at least prompt you to download so-and-so program and drivers in order to support the new device.

That's the sort of thing they want to aim for with all this new udev/sysfs type stuff.