> > > But how long will that last. What I want to know is, what question > > > was devfs an answer to? There must have been one, right? Is it a > > > devfs is a solution in search of a problem. > > that's what I thought.
devfs is _great_. Solaris has had this sort of thing (albeit with shorter to type names) for about a decade; it's about time Linux got something like it. devfs gives absolute names based on device locations. While average users aren't likely to see much benefit, people with truckloads of swappable disks, CDs, etc. need something like this to avoid having to constantly edit /etc/fstab between boots. With devfs I can finally add a SCSI target in the middle of my chain and not have half my disks change their device names. Now if network devices would adopt something similar, life would be beautiful. On a machine with > 8 NICs of various types figuring out which one probed to eth4 can be a problem, especially if some of 'em are hot-swappable and not always present... -- Mike Shuey
