Hi,
I've been having problems with devfs since kernel 2.4.11 (ie. devfs
version 117). The problem (which I can easily reproduce) occurs if I start
X and then start a number of xterms. Then /dev becomes unreadable and all
xterms hangs. Any further access to /dev by any program will produce an
unkillable process. E.g. "ls /dev" will hang and if I switch to another
vc and do "kill -9" on the ls process nothing happens. And as a result, I
can't even do a clean shutdown since init, umount, etc all access /dev.
Now, everything works fine for me with the 2.4.10 kernel (but not with
2.4.11-2.4.13) so I made a patch which basically undos the changes made in
devfs v.117. If I apply my patch to kernel 2.4.13 I'm in business again
and devfs works just fine.
A friend of mine had the exact same problem. However, he noticed that if
he enabled the "Unix98 PTY support" in the kernel the problem went away!
I'm not sure what to make out of that.
Has anyone else seen this problem?
I've attached my patch. Please note that it's quick and dirty and probably
broken in some respect, but at least it makes devfs usable for me again ;)
best regards,
Per
devfs-undo117.diff
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