tron and udev

Thuroughly geeky evening here, I watched Tron and learned a little bit about udev.

I have to confess I've never seen Tron before somehow. Of course I knew about the light cycles, but I never knew why Edwin called his frisbee game "Tron". Heck I never even knew where that "on the other side of the screen, it all looks so easy" sound file that I used to have a boxen play at boot came from. And maybe one of these days I'll venture out onto #tron. Besides finally rounding out these appalling chinks in my geek cred, the movie was farly amusing and even with all that CGI has managed to hold up pretty well. Longer than the majority of CGI-driven films made in the last 10 years ever will.

udev was a little bit less fun, being installed inaverdently as part of a gnome install, which is a real misfeature of Debian if the gnome system in question is not one where hotpluggable devices matter, or if you do care about existing /dev symlinks, keeping the system running, and a /dev/null that's not a plain file. So I had to pause tron and read up on the thing enough to sort these problems out. My attitude toward this is still that of someone who has been once bitten (by devfs, particularly in d-i) and is now twice shy. Some other things I don't like too much about it:

  • Undocumented, Debian-specific files in /etc that claim "this file does not exist".
  • Docs that stress its low memory requirements while ignoring the 2.8 mb tmpfs filesystem it sets up -- most of it in /dev/.udevdb. Granted it can swap out, but this makes me worry about any future use of it in d-i. (And did I mention how we were bitten by adopting devfs?)
  • Ugly, potentially insecure and FHS violating /.dev directories.
  • People associated with the software who are advocating it as the one true way. (Did I mention devfs?)
  • All that appalling ugliness with races and aritrary userspace based delays between loading a module and its device files becoming available that has led to so much joy with ps/2 mice and X.

Overall, it's almost as bad as people who blog about more than one thing in a single blog entry. Maybe like Tron I just need some time to asorb it all though.