devFS?

Matthew Dillon dillon at apollo.backplane.com
Wed Dec 10 13:46:36 PST 2003


:On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 08:10:15AM -0500, Craig Dooley wrote:
:> I've had some ideas on the subject, most of them involved waiting for
:> other parts of the system to flush out, like async kernel-> userspace
:> messaging and perhaps VFS stabilization.  I was also thinking there
:> could be one userspace hotplugd (updated, whatever) to handle all the
:> systems instead of usbd, pccardd, devfsd, etc.  Maybe it could be
:> written in to have the daemon save permissions when exiting/rebooting?
:> Just some ideas i've been having.
:
:I fully agree with this. Both to wait for the async messagings
:between kernel<->userspace and to unite the various helper daemons.
:>From the userland perspective it is simply a "I have this new
:ethernet card" or "I lost the external DVD driver". For the first
:you want to run configuration scripts and perhaps even add a
:systray icon like WinXP does, for the later you want to try to
:clean up as good as possible and remove the (now unneeded) device
:entry. That's a simple solution for a devfs without kernel support.
:Basically just a mfs and a good notification mechanism for the
:userland. Having such notifications for plugging in/removing devices,
:but also status changes (ethernet media!) is highly useful for
:workstations and notebooks, one of the few things MS got right in
:there GUI.
:
:Joerg

    Actually, I think the IPC mechanism I am working on now is better
    suited for those types of messages.  Hmm.  Hmm.  There are a lot of
    things that this IPC could be used for.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxx>





More information about the Kernel mailing list