Baslinux mailing list

[Karolis Lyvens <karolisl AT gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jan 04, 2007 at 03:02:26PM -0600, James Miller wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 04, 2007 at 09:17:55PM +0000, Christof Lange wrote:
> > 
> > Thank you for your answer, James. This seems to indicate that Linux 
> > today is something very different from what BL is about. What is udev 
> > and devfs? At which version of Slackware have these been introduced. 
> > Do Linux users in our days still have to mount devices? 
> 
> I'm far from being any kind of expert on this. My observations are based on 
> the bits that I 
> (think I) understand from tech news pieces I've read. It looks like devfs 
> was under 
> development for the 2.4.x kernel series and that, because of problems, it 
> was dropped in 
> favor of udev during the 2.6.x kernel series. Briefly stated, these are 
> both 
> "special-purpose file systems present on many Unix-like operating systems, 
> used for 
> presenting device files, an abstraction for accessing I/O and other 
> peripherals" (from 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devfs ). The wikipedia entry for udev gives 
> some further 
> information--see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udev . I'm not sure when udev 
> started being 
> used in Slackware--maybe within the last year or so. I'm actually not even 
> sure Slackware 
> _is_ using it: I read an article recently about someone who had installed 
> the latest Slack 
> and, according to their claim, it still ships with a 2.4.x kernel (though 
> you can of course 
> upgrade to 2.6.x). That makes me wonder if Patrick might not be dragging on 
> implementing 
> udev as well.

>From my experience:

In Slackware 10.2 and 11.0, 2.4.x kernel is the default one, but a
precompiled 2.6.x kernel (since 10.2, but i could be wrong) is also
provided. If you use 2.4.x kernel, Slackware will use devfs, but if
you choose to go with a 2.6.x series kernel, Slackware will use udev
(provided that /etc/rc.d/rc.udev is executable). So, Slackware still
uses devfs, but udev is available too.