udev in initrd

[Bill Nottingham]

Owen Taylor (otaylor at redhat.com) said: 
> The value of it on the case of the writable root filesystem is that
> you only have one path for how the system works, not two. Changes
> to device naming only have to be put into one place. Eventually we
> can simple drop the dev package and it's 18,000 files.

The issue here is that it's not *that* simple, once you
start handling all the devices that aren't in sysfs. Moreover,
it breaks the 'load module on device access' model.

Going to a fully dynamic /dev is a paradigm shift, even if you
keep the same device naming model.

> There's a lot of other components of our system which are absurdly
> over-configurable in ways that would badly break the system - the
> X init scripts, the init scripts, gdm, etc, etc. Isn't turning
> over-configurability into a working system one of the main 
> OS-assembly tasks?

Yes, but the raison d'etre of the initscripts or gdm aren't
really 'infinite configurability to whatever policy you want'.
Yet it's a design goal of udev, or at least, it appears to be.

Bill