Re: devfs

[Richard Gooch]

Ed Sweetman writes:
> Ok, that all makes sense.  I removed the dev entries because they
> weren't needed by me anymore but I suppose it doesn't hurt anything
> to just keep them there anyways so I've fixed all that.  Either way,
> removing devfs did nothing but apparently it was asked to be done to
> allow better testing and/or debugging to be done.  But i've yet to
> get any reason why I removed devfs to investigate promise ide
> controller's dma related memory failures.  I've removed devfs and
> replaced the old /dev entries, no problem.  I'm not getting off
> topic about that.  It's all done so i'm waiting for the next step
> here.

It seems the reason you removed devfs is that you followed Al's bad
advice:
Alexander Viro writes:
> Don't be silly - if you want to test anything, devfs is the last
> thing you want on the system.

In fact, devfs works quite robustly for many people, and wasn't
involved in the IDE problems you were having. Al is an absolutist: if
it's not 100% provably correct, it falls into his other category,
"spawn of satan".

So next time someone claims devfs is causing you problems, treat it
with the skepticism it deserves.

				Regards,

					Richard....
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