Differences between version 4 and revision by previous author of DevFs.
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| Newer page: | version 4 | Last edited on Monday, June 25, 2007 12:47:49 pm | by LawrenceDoliveiro | Revert |
| Older page: | version 2 | Last edited on Friday, September 23, 2005 4:07:18 pm | by IanMcDonald | Revert |
@@ -1,5 +1,9 @@
-DevFs
is the Device FileSystem. It's optional starting with LinuxKernel 2.4 and not recommended with LinuxKernel 2.6 as it has been deprecated in favour of [UDev].
+__devfs__
is the Device FileSystem. It's optional starting with LinuxKernel 2.4 and not recommended with LinuxKernel 2.6 as it has been deprecated in favour of SysFs and
[UDev].
-It is
designed so that instead of having to have a central body allocate major and minor numbers (unique identifiers) to devices, you can
access them more like a namespace. For example, your serial port /dev/ttyS2 will
become /dev/tts/2; console /dev/tty3 will
become /dev/vc/3. You can
still have support for the old names for software that would otherwise be confused by these changes.
+It was
designed so that instead of having to have a central body allocate major and minor numbers (unique identifiers) to devices, you could
access them more like a namespace. For example, your serial port /dev/ttyS2 would
become /dev/tts/2; console /dev/tty3 would
become /dev/vc/3. You could
still have support for the old names for software that would otherwise be confused by these changes.
-You can find a detailed description of devfs at http://www.atnf.csiro.au/~
rgooch/linux/docs/devfs.html
+You can find a detailed description of <tt>
devfs</tt>
at http://www.atnf.csiro.au/people/
rgooch/linux/docs/devfs.html.
+
+<tt>devfs</tt> was abandoned for a number of reasons: there were problems with its implementation in the kernel which nobody was prepared to fix, and it enforced a particular device-naming policy, which many people felt was not something that the kernel should be doing.
+
+<tt>udev</tt> by contrast, runs in userspace and can be extensively controlled by the user through its configuration files. Management of device special files is kept separate from information about the hardware; the latter is made available by the kernel through <tt>sysfs</tt>.
