Automatic mount stops after kernel upgrade and sysfs

I really have this thing about backward compatibility, which is why I chose to enable the CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED and CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED_V2 kernel flags when compiling kernel 3.12 for Fedora 12. After all, an old distribution with a new kernel.

This turned out to be wrong: The distribution isn’t all that old, and automounting stopped to work for USB SD cards (and possibly other stuff) as a result of this. Even though running the HAL daemon (an oldie, yes…) with debug info

# hald --daemon=no --verbose=yes

showed that it detected the insertion of the USB device. And still, no automount.

On my system, two things happen when CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED and CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED_V2 are enabled:

The directories for block devices for hard disks disappear, e.g. /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.2/ata1/host0/target0:0:0/0:0:0:0/block/sda and also those for non-disk devices, e.g. /sys/devices/virtual/block/md0/ and /sys/devices/virtual/block/ram0.

Instead, they appear as e.g. /sys/block/sda, with a completely different outline of files. According to the Kconfig help, the parameters that are exposed are more prone to changes over time. In the non-deprecated format, there’s a symbolic link to the respective directory in /sys/devices/ instead of the full-blown directories that appear there in the deprecated mode.

So the CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED_V2 enables this feature by default, which was a mistake. To spare myself the kernel recompilation, I added sysfs.deprecated=0 to the kernel command line, and things went back to normal.