On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 12:31 AM, Dan Egli <[email protected]> wrote: > > *Well, that's interesting. I've seen udev before. I know Gentoo makes heavy > use of it (or at least it did last I looked). I still wonder about that. If > everyone likes the things that udev does, then why did they clobber devfs > out of the kernel all those years ago? devfs and udev were very similar. > The biggest difference that I can see (and I admit I haven't looked closely > at udev beyond making sure it was running back when I had a Gentoo box all > those years ago) was that udev had the option of creating customized device > filenames automatically where as devfs had the device filenames fixed in > the kernel. But then that was what devfsd was supposed to be for in the > first place. Not only did it create symlinks to the actual device files > that were present in the devfs, but I was under the impression that you > could also instruct it to create custom symlinks as well that would still > point to the correct device files. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's my memory at > least.*
I don't remember the exact details--it's been years. But devfs, while good for its day, was more of a stop-gap and was severely broken in many respects--the kernel devs were happy to see it go. Udev is the solution devfs was meant to be, and is far superior. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
