>> I do note you've neglected

>> 4. In dev, what's been created is present (ie, the status quo)
>>    - we know how to implement it today

> You are right.  What problems are there if I want to let the kernel
> do automatically what sysadmin does today by MAKEDEV?

Well, first you have to figure out when to do it.  Note that /dev is
read-only when the kernel first comes up.

Then you'd have to move all the knowledge of name<->number mapping
that's currently kept in MAKEDEV into the kernel, unless you want the
kernel to actually start a shell to run MAKEDEV (which might well be
the cleanest way to do it, but has other issues - for example, either
MAKEDEV has to be prepared to handle devices that don't normally have
/dev entries, or else the kernel has to know, for each device, whether
it should run MAKEDEV).  If you don't want to MAKEDEV everything on
each boot, you need to have that mapping in the kernel anyway to enable
it to probe whether the entries for a given device are already in place
- and hope the admin hasn't renamed them for some reason.

Then you'd have to convince people it's a good idea, unless you're
content to keep it as a private patch.  I have no idea how hard a sell
this would be.

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