On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Emmanuel Dreyfus wrote:

> > Get us a devfs.
>
> On recent Linux systems they have such a thing. It's a pain when you are
> not aware of it: you crawl in single user, looking for a way to remount
> the root R/W, and you spend half an hour looking for the root partition
> device.
>
> Once you know you have to start a service, that's ok, but it seems to me
> that it introduce one more point of failure in the boot process. I hope
> we will be able to keep some vital devs always available on the root
> partition if we implement it some day.

Why do you assume that the devfs we would do would have the same
implementation flaws as the one Linux did? Yes, we're still working in a
vacuum as we don't have code, but we certainly can address the "what will
you do in single-user mode" question. And given NetBSD's past behavior, we
would.

As a specific example, it wouldn't be device nodes on the root file sytem
as once we have devfs, device nodes don't make sense. What would work is
either having the kernel mount it before running init (which is what
FreeBSD does I think), or have init mount it.

Take care,

Bill