What is the future of USB and APM support?
USB has been put forward as one great thing, but that really is not true. USB gives you an electrical standard, but says very little about the protocol used, and that is where the troubles can come in. 2.4 will have a number of basic drivers for mice, keyboards, cameras, scanners, etc. More esoteric devices will probably not be supported. Usually adding support for individual devices will be relatively easy, now that the infrastructure is in place. Regarding APM, what really wants to do is to support ACPI instead, which is a more direct approach. APM is meant to work on larger time scales, where things happen on the order of seconds. With ACPI, you can power things down “between clock ticks,” giving much finer control. He currently has code which works on exactly one laptop in the world, which is a start. Q: Will devfs be in 2.4? A: Probably. But devfs has been “probably” for a long time. He doesn’t like the naming scheme used by devfs, it looks like a flashback loved by old-style Unix
