devfs weirdnesses in 2.4.3 (-ac5)

[Andreas Ferber]

Hi,

I recently noticed some weird behaviour in devfs.

- some symlinks not showing up in directory listings, although they
  are surely existing. I noticed this with symlinks created by devfsd
  for IDE devices (/dev/hda{9,10,11} showing in normal ls, other hda
  entries are hidden). If I explicitly give the name of one of the
  hidden symlinks (for example "ls -l /dev/hda"), it shows the
  symlink, and I can see that the symlink is absolutely correct (as
  far as ls output goes...). Sadly I'm not able to reproduce this
  behaviour now, but read on.
- same thing with ippp*. Some ippp symlinks are now hidden. If I do a
  "rm ippp*" in /dev, the visible symlinks are removed, and
  the hidden entries become visible. With a second "rm ippp*", the
  originally hidden symlinks are also removed.

The kernel version used is 2.4.3-ac5, but as the ac patches only
change one line in devfs code, related to devfsd notification, I think
the problem should exist in non-ac kernel also.

Andreas
-- 
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is only because we have no choice.
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