From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261329AbVCHF4i (ORCPT ); Tue, 8 Mar 2005 00:56:38 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261523AbVCHF4i (ORCPT ); Tue, 8 Mar 2005 00:56:38 -0500 Received: from pentafluge.infradead.org ([213.146.154.40]:23749 "EHLO pentafluge.infradead.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261329AbVCHF4a (ORCPT ); Tue, 8 Mar 2005 00:56:30 -0500 Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2005 05:56:27 +0000 From: Christoph Hellwig To: Andrew Morton Cc: Christoph Hellwig , mpm@selenic.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, viro@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk Subject: Re: [PATCH] unified device list allocator Message-ID: <20050308055627.GA1515@infradead.org> Mail-Followup-To: Christoph Hellwig , Andrew Morton , mpm@selenic.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, viro@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk References: <20050308051818.GI3120@waste.org> <20050307213302.560de053.akpm@osdl.org> <20050308054325.GA1262@infradead.org> <20050307215035.345c3f63.akpm@osdl.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20050307215035.345c3f63.akpm@osdl.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.1i X-SRS-Rewrite: SMTP reverse-path rewritten from by pentafluge.infradead.org See http://www.infradead.org/rpr.html Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Mon, Mar 07, 2005 at 09:50:35PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote: > > register_blkdev only happens at module_init time (and in fact should go > > away completely, so I'm not happy wit hthe surgey to keep it barely alive > > at all) > > Is anyone working on that? I had a patch from a long time ago that just killed it, but that one isn't useable for current users anymore. There's two things it's doing currently: - when called with the major argument as 0 it returns an unused major number from the top of the old 255 entries major list. This should be replaced by a real dynamic dev_t allocator, similar to alloc_chrdev_region. - /proc/devices. This interface has traditionally been used by things like installer but these day's it's totally bogus as the one major, one driver limitation got lifeted. We'll probably have to deprecate it and kill it in half a year or a similar timespan.