Re: 2.6.0 stability and the BK scsi trees

[Badari Pulavarty <pbadari@us.ibm.com>]

On Saturday 18 October 2003 09:38 am, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 18, 2003 at 08:24:50AM -0700, Patrick Mansfield wrote:
> > If you have not seen it, Badari's sd patch is in the mm tree:
> >
> > ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.0-test7
> >/2.6.0-test7-mm1/broken-out/support-zillions-of-scsi-disks.patch
>
> I hadn't ... it doesn't address expanding the number of partitions or
> the problem that the sd_index_bits array will grow to a huge size.

Yes. I did not want to address expanding the number of partitions issue -
since there is no resolution on it. (to be frank, I am not really interested 
in it - so never looked at).

I address sd_index_bits array problem in a crude way. I made the max number
of disks to support as configurable.

I wanted to make the patch really simple - so that we can make few 
decisions before making too many changes.

All I wanted to do was following:

- support > 256 scsi disks
- for now, maintain backward compatibility with current /dev major/minor
  assignments
- test out any kernel (lowmem bloating) issues.

Thanks,
Badari