On Sun, 13 Mar 2022 15:23:11 +1300, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'It shipped with Linux kernel 2.4.18 which many of the Linux old-timers (myself included) will remember was right before we started to get nice things like auto-mounting USB drives in kernel 2.6.'
Was that with devfs? I remember the Mandrake 9.1 install I was running for a while in 2004 had devfs, though it was already disappearing from most distros in favour of the modern udev system. devfs was a virtual file system, normally mounted in the /dev directory, which made all your hardware automatically appear as device files. Sounded like a neat idea, but besides having (reportedly) fundamental “unfixable” bugs, it violated the concept that the kernel should only provide mechanisms for doing things, not enforce particular policies -- those should be configurable in userland, under the control of the sysadmins/users. So now we have sysfs, normally mounted at /sys, which provides information (and accepts control) over your hardware, nothing more. What is put into /dev (and used to do actual device I/O) is managed by the udev process, under the control of rules files that can be configured in a great variety of ways.
'If you wanted to build software, you had to use an absolutely ancient gcc toolchain (2.95.3).'
GCC 2.95 represented the reunification of EGCS and GCC, according to <https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/History>. Or rather, the EGCS fork took over the “GCC” branding. EGCS was created a couple of years earlier after dissatisfaction with how the FSF was managing the project.