There is a question that bugs me a while now.
Back in the old days you would create all the device nodes in /dev by
hand or get the most important ones installed by your favourite
distribution. At that time you would have grabbed a very slow and old
machine and installed Linux on it, as no other modern operating system
would run anymore on it. :-P
To spare your memory, you would make your kernel autoload modules.
Whenever you access a device node for which the kernel module would not
have been loaded, the kernel would load it for you.
Its big disadvantage was: you could know which name in /dev is provided
by which kernel module, but without knowing it's major and minor number,
you couldn't create that device node. I sometimes spent hours googling
to figure out what major/minor a specific kernel module provides.
Nowadays you wouldn't have that trouble. devfs and later udev take that
away (at least I believe so). You modprobe the 'ide-cd' kernel module
and /dev/cdrom appears. However, to get /dev/cdrom, I have to load that
module at boot time, although 95% of the time I wouldn't need my CD-ROM.
I wonder if anyone of you has an idea of how I get these two concepts
merged. I want to have all the device nodes in /dev for which the kernel
could load a module, but it should only load it when it is needed.
Ideas anyone?
Thanks in advance.
Dirk.
--
There are two major products that come from Berkeley : LSD and UNIX.
We don't believe this to be a coincidence. (Jeremy S. Anderson)
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dubailug/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
