How Devfs and dev file system differ

linux linux-device-driver device-driver kernel
Santhosh Pai picture Santhosh Pai · May 8, 2013 · Viewed 8.9k times · Source

I read about devfs(known as device file system ) to facilitate device driver programming as mentioned in linux device drivers text . How different is devfs from /dev directory in linux.Are they both same ?, i'm quite confused .

Answer

duskwuff -inactive- picture duskwuff -inactive- · May 8, 2013

/dev is a directory. It tends to have mostly device nodes in it.

devfs is an obsolete and no longer available virtual filesystem that automatically generated the contents of /dev on some older versions of the Linux kernel. These days, it has been replaced by udev, a daemon that manages the contents of /dev in a temporary filesystem, or by devtmpfs, which is a lightweight replacement for devfs that is used in some minimal systems.

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