Re: a fundamental question

["Kevin P. Fleming" <kpfleming@xxxxxxx>]

Georgi Georgiev wrote:

> I see there is something that obviously I had not understood for a 
> long time,
> so....
>
> Aren't symlinks the responsibility of the devfsd daemon?

Some are, yes. Those designed to emulate older /dev entries are the 
responsbility of _some_ userspace application, usually devfsd.

> A system with mounted /dev and NOT having devfsd running, has no
> symlinks in /dev, does it? Short of stdin, stdout etc I guess.

Not at all; my main server uses devfs and does not even have devfsd 
installed. All the normal devfs entries are there, include /dev/discs, 
/dev/cdroms, etc.

> Is this something I am completely confused about? I figured a long 
> time ago,
> that when I am the only one with a different opinion, it is usually 
> so, because
> I am wrong. But, please, explain.

Yes, you are mistaken :-) However, if this is in reference to the recent 
discussion about mounting root filesystems and not having "short" /dev 
paths available, this is where the confusion comes from.

For some reason, the /dev _namespace_ inside the kernel is a distinct 
entity from the devfs _filesystem_ that normally gets mounted on /dev. 
All the /dev _namespace_ entries appear in the devfs filesystem, but 
also there are many symlinks to make things easier to use. I don't know 
if those symlinks are visible in the /dev namespace inside the kernel, 
but I think not since many people have trouble using them as arguments 
to the "root=" kernel parameter.