The Linux Device File-System

The Device File-System (devfs) provides a powerful new device management mechanism for Linux. Unlike other existing and proposed device management schemes, it is powerful, flexible, scalable and efficient.

It is an alternative to conventional disc-based character and block special devices. Kernel device drivers can register devices by name rather than device numbers, and these device entries will appear in the file-system automatically.

Devfs provides an immediate benefit to system administrators, as it implements a device naming scheme which is more convenient for large systems (providing a topology-based name-space) and small systems (via a device-class based name-space) alike.