*BSD News Article 93066


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From: wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu (Bill Paul)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: what happened to lsddev
Date: 7 Apr 1997 14:25:59 GMT
Organization: Columbia University Center for Telecommunications Research
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Daring to challenge the will of the almighty Leviam00se, Martin Machacek
(martin@eunet.cz) had the courage to say:

: I'm just curious, what happened to the fine lsdev command in the 2.2
: branch? Trying lsdev on 2.2.1 release (the same under 2.2 alpha):

: # lsdev
: lsdev: sysctl(hw.devconf.number): No such file or directory

Lsdev and its corresponding devconf kernel support were yanked from
the tree several months ago. The reason given was lack of maintenance
by the guy who created it: not all device drivers were using it and nobody
was doing any work on it. What you are doing is using a FreeBSD 2.1.x
lsdev binary on a 2.2.x system. There is no lsdev command with 2.2.x and
up anymore.

: It seemed to be OK up to 2.1.6. Not that I would terribly need this
: command (all it gives me I can get from dmesg anyway) but it was kind
: nice to have it, especially for the case you have a long running machine
: and /var/log/messages gets clobbered  with other console messages and
: dmesg says nothing meaningful anymore.

Devconf and lsdev were meant to have a more complex purpose, namely
keeping track of devices so that you could do interesting things like
hot swap them. Part of devconf seems to have been superceeded by devfs,
however the latter is still in development and not ready for prime time.
(Another use was for the install floppy: there's only a limited number of
inodes available on the floppy filesystem, which makes it hard to have
/dev entries for all possible devices on the system. One solution for this
is to have something like devconf which you can use to get a listing of
all actual devices configured into the system and mknod /dev entries on
the fly.)

Looking back at the 4.4BSD-Lite sources, there was already some support
for autoconfiguring and tracking of devices, however nobody has seen fit
to do anything with it (probably because of the huge amount of work involved
if getting all our device drivers to use it). A piece of it remains however
in /sys/kern/subr_autoconf.c.

There's supposed to be work going on somewhere to put together a more
complete successor to devconf, but I don't know how this is progressing
(I've been too busy with NIS+).

-Bill

--
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-Bill Paul            (212) 854-6020 | System Manager, Master of Unix-Fu
Work:         wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu | Center for Telecommunications Research
Home:  wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu | Columbia University, New York City
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