KernelTrap: The Future Of Devfs

“The removal of the deprecated devfs from the mainline kernel
took another step forward today with a patch from Greg KH that
removes devfs from the build process. He adds, ‘if this goes well,
and there are no complaints for a few weeks, I’ll resend my big
‘devfs-die-die-die’ series of patches that rip the whole thing out
of the kernel tree.’ Mike Bell expressed concern, ‘once devfs is
out, it’s out for good. It is for all intents and purposes
impossible to maintain such a thing outside of mainline. You should
know that, udev’s kernel infrastructure was developed pretty much
entirely within mainline and look how long it took to get even the
present number of drivers working with it.’ The replacement for
devfs is udev, which Greg KH began developing in 2001…”

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