Can mdev replace udev in an ordinary linux distro?

[Nathan Phillip Brink]

On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 01:53:20PM +0200, Bernd Petrovitsch wrote:
> On Don, 2011-09-15 at 22:32 +0200, Harald Becker wrote:
> > > I don't think that mdev supports an mdev.conf.d/ sort of paradigm ...
> > 
> > ... but we can implement that /etc/mdev.d feature ... it is not too
> > difficult to do.
> > 
> > With an /etc/mdev.d system it would be easy for other packages to add
> > mdev rules to the system. That way we do not mangle with /etc/mdev.conf
> > in every package and scripting would be a lot easier.
> 
> Not that I'm an udev or mdev expert but what's then the difference to
> udev?

Unfortunately I'm not a udev or mdev expert either, but:

udev has udevd instead of being a run-once deal. mdev can be
registered into /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug and be run for every device
add/remove event, where udev appears to receive kernel events using a
different mechanism.

Adding /etc/mdev.d would not make mdev into udev, it would just make
mdev more modularly configurable which works with the concept of
software packages.

> Supporting the same features in quite similar way make me fear that it
> will be similarly slow.

Well, from what I understand, mdev parses through the entire
/etc/mdev.conf file for every device it discovers (I think it does
this even when running `mdev -s' which scans all existing
devices). This makes mdev smaller and simpler, but probably less
efficient than a daemon which parses and caches the whole
configuration (like udevd). Adding a bunch of rules to mdev with more
hooks and having it parse multiple files in an mdev.conf.d definitely
would decrease the efficiency of a system with an mdev setup. But it
would still be a simpler and perhaps easier to understand setup than a
udevd one(?)

-- 
binki

Look out for missing or extraneous apostrophes!
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