HEADS UP - DEVFS ON MASTER

[Matthew Dillon]

    Alex's GSOC project, DEVFS is now on master and active.  Some care must
    be taken when upgrading.

    * A full buildworld, buildkernel, installkernel, installworld sequence
      is needed.  No changes to fstab are needed, /dev will be mounted
      from devfs automatically by the kernel.

    * If you run a new kernel with an old world (without devfs) you will
      not be able to login as root, but you will still be able to login
      as a user and su, and you should still be able to boot single-user.

      In otherwords, things will be messed up but in a fixable way, until
      both the world and the kernel are in sync.

    * A great deal of testing of basic functions has been done, but
      there is still a very good chance of breakage.  Please test and
      report any issues.  Very few GUI components have been tested,
      so if X or sound stops working it may be a day or two before we
      can get it whacked back into shape.

    * The master branch may be unstable for a week as wider testing is
      done.

    * PEOPLE RUNNING CHROOTS: Character and block devices in the filesystem
      NO LONGER WORK.  If you have chrooted or jailed areas with their own
      /dev, you have to use mount_devfs in those areas.

    Many features are now working.  We have auto-cloning support for
    numerous devices but only a few userland utilities have been adjusted
    to use it.  To reduce issues DEVFS will pre-create a bunch of units for
    numerous devices so the non-cloning userland utilities still work.

    In addition, fully automatic slice and partition probing and reprobing
    is now operational.  When you fdisk a drive the slices will pop up
    in /dev, and when you disklabel a slice the partitinos will pop up
    as well.  MBR and disklabel edits will properly and automatically
    reprobe the drive.  IMHO this is a very, very cool feature.

    The nrelease build still has a few issues.  It will work and the intaller
    will come up, but the installer may have trouble seeing newly created
    partitions (a 'retry' usually solves the problem).  This is a known
    issue and will be fixed.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at backplane.com>