No more MAKEDEV?

[Jon Masters]

On Thu, 2008-10-16 at 14:42 +0200, Harald Hoyer wrote:
> Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> > On Thu, 18 Sep 2008 17:41:12 -0700
> > Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com> wrote:
> > 
> >> Looking at some of the inefficiencies in bootup (in regards to the 5
> >> second Fedora boot), we came across MAKEDEV. To be short - it's a pig.
> >>
> >> The only user of it in Fedora is udev, which uses it for entries in
> >> /etc/udev/makedev.d. However, there's an already-upstream solution
> >> of putting device nodes in /lib/udev/devices. Why not just use this,
> >> remove MAKEDEV, simplify start_udev, and boot faster?
> > 
> > this btw can be done in two steps; 
> > Step 1) Put the standard static device nodes in /lib/udev/devices
> > Step 2) Once MAKEDEV no longer is used as a result, obsolete it
> > 
> > Step 1) is obviously simple and can be done with no risk ... and will
> > in practice make MAKEDEV unused and gives you the boottime gain
> 
> 
> I switched from /lib/udev/devices to MAKEDEV!

Understood. And in answer to Chuck's followup, I think the concern is
that because /dev is going to be mounted over we'd rather store the
static entries someplace else physically outside that mountpoint.

> Complaints have been filed in bugzilla, because /lib should not contain devices.
> a
> # grep -r foo /lib
> could do harm!

That's a validish complaint actually. Maybe a /dev_static or something
is actually called for. Otherwise fun and games with bind mounts.

> selinux does not like devices in /lib also.

Personally, I don't care what the SELinux policy does or doesn't like -
it can and should be adapted to whatever is decided :)

Jon.