Re: Newbie question: running devfsd forces implicit mount of /proc?

["David Gilbert" <ad_gilbert@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Pavel,

Thanks for reassuring me that I'm not losing my marbles.

Ditto about the kernel mounting all "internal" filesystems (I kernel mount 
devfs at boot time) Your point about 'undocumented' is somthing that I had 
forgotten. It might be time to reinstate the explicit mount of /proc (maybe 
before running devfsd??)

And, yes my 'distro' was doing an explict mount of /proc not 'mount -a -t 
procfs'. Hence the error message.

At the end of the day, I'm not about to go all wobbly about using devfs - I 
think it is a huge improvement over paging through screens of unused /dev 
nodes, plus netboot roots and.. (insert all of Richard's reasons here).

Cheers
David

----Original Message Follows----
From: Pavel Roskin <proski@xxxxxxx>
To: Russell Coker <russell@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
CC: David Gilbert <ad_gilbert@xxxxxxxxxxx>, <devfs@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Newbie question: running devfsd forces implicit mount of /proc?
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 14:22:53 -0400 (EDT)

Hello!

> > Once running, I noticed errors from the init scripts about trying to 
mount
> > /proc. I've disabled the explict mount of /proc to work around the 
problem.
> > But what's going on? It seems that once devfsd is running there is an
> > implicit mounting of /proc? Is this normal behaviour?

I don't know the exact reasons, but that's what I see as well (I looked a
few months ago).  Personally, I have no problems with kernel mounting all
the supported "internal" filesystems (procfs, devfs, devptf, usbdevfs) at
startup.  But the interdependency between devfs and procfs being mounted
is indeed weird.

Since this feature seems to be undocumented and can go away, I prefer not
to rely on it and use the following command to mount procfs if it needs to
be mounted:

mount -a -t procfs

This command doesn't generate any errors if /proc is already mounted.

> You don't mention which distribution you're using, it's probably a
> distribution issue.

It may be a distribution issue, because some distributions try mounting
filesystems explicitly at startup, whike others more or less rely on "-a"
option to mount.

> My start script for Debian mounts /proc because that's the only way to
> determine whether it's already running.

I don't understand.  What is running?  To check if /proc is mounted, one
can check existance of /proc/mounts - if it's missing, /proc is not
mounted.  But "mount -a -t procfs" is much more graceful in my opinion.

> Why is this a problem?

I understand that an error message is a problem - the system should not
report errors if everything is Ok.

--
Regards,
Pavel Roskin




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