From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: James Bottomley Subject: Re: lots and lots of disks again Date: 12 Feb 2004 10:20:43 -0500 Sender: linux-scsi-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <1076599243.1993.84.camel@mulgrave> References: <20040210110417.GB4010@tpkurt.garloff.de> <20040210112658.GC4010@tpkurt.garloff.de> <20040210133932.A3870@infradead.org> <20040210154751.GH4010@tpkurt.garloff.de> <20040210102603.0c835212.akpm@osdl.org> <20040211145614.GA4010@tpkurt.garloff.de> <20040211132848.49eece0d.akpm@osdl.org> <20040211220918.GJ4010@tpkurt.garloff.de> <20040211142933.484ca978.akpm@osdl.org> <20040211225348.GM21151@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk> <20040212150035.GN1780@tpkurt.garloff.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Received: from stat1.steeleye.com ([65.114.3.130]:4773 "EHLO hancock.sc.steeleye.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S266472AbUBLPVL (ORCPT ); Thu, 12 Feb 2004 10:21:11 -0500 In-Reply-To: <20040212150035.GN1780@tpkurt.garloff.de> List-Id: linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org To: Kurt Garloff Cc: viro@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk, Andrew Morton , hch@infradead.org, SCSI Mailing List , pbadari@us.ibm.com, willy@debian.org As I understand it, we can do aliasing in gendisk (two different major/minor sets for the same disc), could we also do this if we have different numbers of partitions on them? What I was thinking is just keep the partition mask for our current majors and allocate a new major for the large disk configurations with a different partition mask. As long as we can alias our old scheme to the new one (and obviously everyone using the old scheme may have inaccessible partitions if the disc were partitioned by the new scheme), it would seem to provide backwards compatibility required by 2.6 and a way of moving to 64 (or however many partitions we want) if the user desires. As long as this won't induce any nasty complications, I think it's workable and we can simply drop all the old SCSI majors in 2.7 James