The last time I installed Gentoo, devfsd was the standard device-fs daemon. This time, I had several problems: First, I didn’t get a console, because udev failed to create /dev/ttyX. Then, it did create /dev/md0 but didn’t bother about /dev/md1 where all my data is stored. So i had to browse around in /dev and symlink the files myself. As a result of these experiences I’m back at devfsd, even if it’s considered obsolete. It may be obsolete, but it works. Why do we have to use dynamically generated /dev dirs anyway? An old static mknod.sh or so would have done the same job as well as udev. Why do things have to be more complicated than necessary?
3 thoughts on “little rant about /dev”
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Gentoo should work just fine without devfs or udev. If for some reason it doesn’t, then it’s a bug that our crack base-system team will fix.
It is your choice and Gentoo still offers that choice. The other issue is that running stuff in user space is more secure than kernel space. The third issue is that static nodes do not get the job done in the era of hotplugging. You can’t count on you USB mouse being /dev/input/mouse0 every time you plug it in. With udev/sysfs, you can guarantee that your USB mouse will always be at /dev/{insert path} and thus no dynamic rewriting of X configuration or other files is necessary. Bottom line, unless the choice of devfs or static nodes are removed and they are what you want, don’t complain about other choices being available.
All the hotplugging issues would not work without udev/devfs. So it would be quite bad to have a static solution. I want to have hotplug, D-Bus and Hald furthermore. Static solution sucks more then the current.