< Previous | Contents | Next >
7.3.1. History
In February 2000, a new filesystem called devfs was merged into the 2.3.46 kernel and was made available during the 2.4 series of stable kernels. Although it was present in the kernel source itself, this method of creating devices dynamically never received overwhelming support from the core kernel developers.
The main problem with the approach adopted by devfs was the way it handled device detection, creation, and naming. The latter issue, that of device node naming, was perhaps the most critical. It is generally accepted that if device names are allowed to be configurable, then the device naming policy should be up to a system administrator, not imposed on them by any particular developer(s). The devfs file system also suffered from race conditions that were inherent in its design and could not be fixed without a substantial revision to the kernel. It was marked as deprecated for a long period – due to a lack of maintenance – and was finally removed from the kernel in June, 2006.
With the development of the unstable 2.5 kernel tree, later released as the 2.6 series of stable kernels, a new virtual filesystem called sysfs came to be. The job of sysfs is to export a view of the system's hardware configuration to userspace processes. With this userspace-visible representation, the possibility of developing a userspace replacement for devfs became much more realistic.