Is there any plan to adopt devtmpfs ?

[Arthur Chance]

On 05/03/2015 15:38, Manish Jain wrote:
> I love FreeBSD, and a lot of people whom I have shown my box to have
> taken a fancy. It was with a lot of expectation that I downloaded and
> installed freebsd-10.1-i386. The system was likable enough, till I found
> a lot of hardware would not work - my canon printer gets detected in
> dmesg, but cups cannot locate any local printer; my APC UPS is able to

It's worth remembering that CUPS is often said to be an acronym for 
Can't Usually Print Stuff. Give me lpr any day.

> perform a self test but is unable to shut down the system in case of a
> power outage on account of some communication failure re battery levels;
> and finally my keyboard stops responding. All these are USB devices, and
> I for some time believed that there might some problem with the USB stack.
>
> Just for kicks, I decided to try Linux to see if my stuff works. On
> Debian 7.8, neither the printer works nor does the UPS. However, with
> Ubuntu 14.10 the printer detection and installation was a cinch. I did
> not test the UPS, but I am sure that would have worked too - but the
> Unity desktop is too painful for me to verify this fully.
>
> The one thing I noticed about Ubuntu 14.10 is that it uses a lot of
> virtual filesystems, headed by devtmpfs. Is it possible that a lot of
> hardware that currently is not working smoothly on FreeBSD will liven up
> simply by migrating one step ahead of devfs ? If yes, is there a
> possibility that we might be getting devtmpfs in 10.2/11.x ?

After a quick google to find out what devtmpfs was I found

"devtmpfs is a file system with automated device nodes populated by the 
kernel."

That's what devfs already is. Plug a device in, and if it's known it 
appears somewhere in your devfs. Unplug it and it disappears.

As for virtual file systems, FBSD already has devfs, procfs, fdescfs, 
mqueuefs, for Linux compatibility it has linprocfs & linsysfs, and 
depending on how you define a virtual fs, possibly tmpfs, nullfs and 
unionfs. Isn't that enough to be going on with?

-- 
Those who do not learn from computing history are doomed to
GOTO 1