Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 23rd Aug 2008 15:31 UTC
"Once upon a time, a Linux distribution would be installed with a /dev directory fully populated with device files. Most of them represented hardware which would never be present on the installed system, but they needed to be there just in case. Toward the end of this era, it was not uncommon to find systems with around 20,000 special files in /dev, and the number continued to grow. This scheme was unwieldy at best, and the growing number of hotpluggable devices (and devices in general) threatened to make the whole structure collapse under its own weight. Something, clearly, needed to be done." The solution came in the form of udev, and udev uses rules to determine how it should handle devices. This allows distributors to tweak how they want devices to be handled. "Or maybe not. Udev maintainer Kay Sievers has recently let it be known that he would like all distributors to be using the set of udev rules shipped with the program itself." ComputerWorld dives into the situation.
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Member since:
2006-02-05
Windows has had a HAL for over a decade now. Not the main thing I wanted to respond to, but the Linux HAL was far from revolutionary, it is something it was way behind on.
<rant>
Convention is almost always more important, and more useful, then specifications. Specs are usually a lowest common denominator, and typically convention goes far beyond specification. For example, the ANSI SQL spec has no way to do stored procedures in a database. SProcs are a vital feature of any half-way decent RDBMS, and any one worth its salt has a really good implementation of the feature. If you put out a database and didn't have support for sprocs, chances are nobody would ever use your product. They would have good reason too.
The other thing is Specs are generally put out by consortiums of companies with competing interests, and what gets in or doesn't tends to have as much to do with politics as technical merit. Conventions occur when everyone does something a certain way because that is the way that has proven itself to be the best.
</rant>
Edited 2008-08-24 04:05 UTC