I felt it necessary to throw in some outside comments regarding usbdevfs,
devfs and userspace drivers. We (the rio500 guys . . mainly Bruce
Tenison) have written a userspace driver for the rio500. It works quite
well and its lead me to believe that this the the right way to go for many
devices (ours among them).
That being said, I personally will not move to devfs until I see broad
support by the distros. Sorry but I don't have time to dink around with
devfsd and get my system up and running smoothly under the new semantics.
I really have no interest in committing the time to breaking a working
system and then re-fixing it for something that isn't clearly a long term
direction yet. I agree with devfs' purpose but I want to see full scale
commitment to this direction before I move to it.
So, under JE's proposal, I will no longer be able to use the rio userspace
driver(unless I move to devfs). How am I supposed to convince rio users
that they should use it? Tell them sure, use usbdevfs but that means use
devfs which means wholesale reconfiguration of your system? Just to use a
rio? Give me a break! When the time comes that the major distros ship
with devfs setup by default, it will be much easier to tell "joe user" to
use the userspace driver but right now, it makes no sense . .
especially when using a kernel module would require so much less work on
their part. I know that just because something is easier doesn't mean its
the right way to do something but be realistic . . that's how many people
think.
I think the USB team needs to think about the priorities of its goals.
One goal is to move many of the drivers to userspace. If this is the
highest priority goal, then usbdevfs should be functional without devfs.
By making devfs a requirement of usbdevfs and thereby a requirement for
userspace drivers, the setup required to use a userspace driver now
increases significantly. Personally, I think usbdevfs ONLY via devfs is
going to grind the move to userspace drivers to a screeching halt. For me
personally, if this move is made, I'll move back to the rio kernel driver
for the time being.
Keith Clayton
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
The PPC rio500 guy
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