On Tue, 29 Jan 2002, dman wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 30, 2002 at 06:52:07AM +0800, csj wrote: > | On 29 Jan 2002 11:03:07 -0800 > | Dave Carrigan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > | > | > Walter Tautz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > | > > | [...] > | > > | > > Just curious to hear other people's opinions on this matter, i.e. > | > > don't use devfs. It seems to me the debian kernel should have > | > > CONFIG_DEVFS_FS=n. > | > > | > Some people want devfs. Devfs can't be created as a module. Hence, the > | > logical choice is to build the kernel with devfs support. Nothing's > | > forcing you to use devfs, even if your kernel has devfs support, and the > | > overhead is not very much. > | > | But, let's say I just want to play with devfs, could I still go back to > | my old disk-based setup? Could I still boot my old devfsd-disabled > | kernel after using a devfsd-enabled kernel? > > The only hiccup I think you'll see if you do this is : > > Suppose you decide you like the devfs name so you edit your fstab to > use devfs names for all partitions. Now you boot your static-dev > kernel, and, oops! those device names don't exist. > > You could, of course, create static directories in /dev and stick > inodes there so the old-style kernel works with new-style paths. A > better solution is to use devfsd with your devfs kernel to provide > compatibility links and keep the old-style paths in your application > config files. > > (this reminds me, one of these days I gotta boot with a floppy and > clean out /dev and /tmp since I'm using devfs and tmpfs now) > > -D It should be noted that the devfsd package creates some softlinks to the old device names at least it did after I installed it. Also the /etc/init.d/devfsd script checks to see if it should mount dev. Apparently if the file mount_at_boot in /etc/devfs/ exists it will so this suggests that booting into a non-devfs kernel should work. As dave has kindly explained, /dev under devfs is a proc like file system if I understood him correctly. I.e. it represents an internal kernel data structure. Strangely enough it is not clear how the softlinks were generated since looking at /etc/init.d/devfsd shows the file /etc/devfs/symlinks.list is empty in my case....oh well. -walter
