The 05/01/12, Pandu Poluan wrote: > And mdev might be a 'toy' to you, but embedded Linux developers will > vehemently disagree with you. > > And based on the responses in this thread, server guys will also > disagree with you.
On the embedded side, we need udev much more than you think to support bluetooth, tablet and so. Android uses udev. This is even more true when we know that users will expect to have any plugged-in devices at whatever boot time or runing system be working out of the box. BTW, this is not a major problem since embedded devices already often use initramfs. On servers, I wouldn't be surprised that hypervisor tools will expect /dev/cdrom instead of /dev/sr0. AFAIK, mdev doesn't provide persistent device names and changing a ethernet card might result in a highly broken system where udev will let all interfaces working but the changed one. Worse, I think mdev might change of device names upon reboot so that all ethernet devices can be mixed up in ways like eth0 -> eth1, eth1 -> eth3 and eth2 -> eth0. These are only few examples and this is whole mdev hack (requirements and consequences) that makes "mdev alternative" look like a toy. People thinking that mdev could replace udev even on embedded devices and servers are wrong for both current or longer term. You might like it or not but udev is a core system tool, nowadays. As admin, I will expect to have a initramfs and udev on linux systems whatever they are desktop, embedded or servers. Actually, I already rely on initramfs for all of these kind of systems for years with success. -- Nicolas Sebrecht
