No more MAKEDEV?

[Bernie Innocenti]

Bill Nottingham wrote:
> The only user of it in Fedora is udev, which uses it for entries in
> /etc/udev/makedev.d. However, there's an already-upstream solution
> of putting device nodes in /lib/udev/devices. Why not just use this,
> remove MAKEDEV, simplify start_udev, and boot faster?

Another subtle source of inefficiency at boot time comes from the 64 
hard-coded number virtual terminals in the kernel (tty0 to tty63).

It's particularly annoying for embedded systems because the kernel 
preallocates various data structures according to this value.

The majority of udev's debug output on small systems originates from tty 
initialization, although it may take very little time in practice.
Moreover, console-kit-daemon needs to create 64 threads because the 
VT_WAITACTIVE ioctl is blocking as someone suggested yesterday on 
#fedora-devel.  It may be a  big waste of resources, but  it makes us look 
bad in the face of Linux haters :-)

Fixing such an ancient kernel/userland interface without breaking dozens 
of legaciy tools would be an interesting challenge.

-- 
    \___/  Bernie Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
   _| X |  Sugar Labs Team  - http://www.sugarlabs.org/
   \|_O_|  "It's an education project, not a laptop project!"