> I'm not here to trash Fedora. I support their right to be inferior. > But when a Redhat employee uses his position as a udev developer to > force Redhat's ideas down the throats of all other linux distros this > gets many people angry.
Yeah, the Redhat guys are also the ones who want to make systemd the default process 1 on a Linux system. (Because the right way to handle process supervision and service dependencies without having to care about process crashes is to move all the code into process 1, amirite?) The udev approach is a simple and elegant way to delegate kernel worload to the userspace. The udevd program, on the other hand, is a craptacular spaghetti monster. Someone at Redhat obviously does not understand the benefits of simplicity, and does not think Linux can run on anything else than a 3 GHz, 4 GB i386-based PC that can stand the bloat. > It has set off a firestorm on the Gentoo User mailing list. About time. > If mdev can replace udev a lot of Gentoo users would be very happy. mdev does nothing magical: look at the mdev.c source code, it's actually very easy to read (thanks Rob). Well, udevd doesn't do anything magical either, but it hides it well under a complex ad-hoc language and scattered files on the filesystem. The point of the userland part of the udev mechanism can be summed up as follows: * be triggered when the kernel asks for it (either via direct userspace program invocation a la /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug, or via the netlink) * interpret what the kernel is asking for and do it. mdev is a basic C program that just (more or less) automatically adds/removes nodes in /dev according to a configuration file, which is about the least work you can do when you need a dynamic /dev filesystem; but *everything* udev does can be scripted. The complexity here comes from the variety of systems, of devices to handle, of potential actions to take. For a generic distribution such as Gentoo, this can represent a lot of work - but the world would certainly be a better place if that work was done. -- Laurent _______________________________________________ busybox mailing list [email protected] http://lists.busybox.net/mailman/listinfo/busybox
