usb/umass, devfs: this sucks

[Mikhail Teterin]

On субота 22 грудень 2007, Mike Tancsa wrote:
= Perhaps its the one card reader you are using is particularly 
= problematic ? I have been using the multi-type cheapo reader below 
= for some time

Perhaps. But /nothing/ excuses devfs hanging for 25 minutes. Nothing. It 
should be more resilient to such problems. It should be possible to interrupt 
a hung operation too.

= We go through the following steps when using it.  We always plug the 
= reader in without a card. Then we put the card in and do a
= cat /dev/null > /dev/da1
= ... or whatever the device is.  Its been quite reliable this way for us.
= The other caveat is never to pull the card or reader when its mounted.

Yes, I go through these steps too and am also aware of the caveat(s). And it 
sucks (see Subject), that one has to keep all of this in mind in order to 
perform a trivial operation: transfer a few pictures from a media card to 
their home directory.

If we want people to give FreeBSD a try in good faith, it is both profoundly 
stupid and dishonest on our part to claim, we have a working USB-system... It 
does not matter, how great our buffer-sharing VM is, if a home user can't 
process their photos with a FreeBSD-powered computer.

	-mi