Re: lots and lots of disks again

Kurt Garloff
2004-02-17T11:21:41Z

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Hi James,

On Mon, Feb 16, 2004 at 07:56:10PM -0500, James Bottomley wrote:
> Thus it makes sense to have a boot time switch for this, for 2.6 it
> would be an "opt in" to the new major, for 2.7 it would be an "opt out".

OK, if you take care to register some major number (or some space for
dev_t in newspeak), I'll write the patch to allow the SCSI disks to
be registered there. We need about 20 bits, IMHO.

> I don't see a reason to keep the old majors hanging around after 2.7 if
> this is the chosen solution ... any user application relying on hard
> coded device numbers is by definition broken.

Agreed.

> On Mon, 2004-02-16 at 17:57, Andries Brouwer wrote:
> > It is not either or, but both.
> > Old devices must not change number.
>
> I don't understand this. The user does not know devices by number but
> by device node name (which is chosen by the OS vendor who populated
> /dev/ now, or by udev in future). I agree the node name should not
> change, but don't see any reason why the major/minor might not.

You underestimate the amount of cruft code out there that does care.
Unfortunately. Some programs (think scsiformat, ...) do want to know
what transport the underlying hardware actually uses. And determine
this by looking at the device number.
I expect it will take some time to sort this all out.

Regards,
--
Kurt Garloff <garloff@suse.de> Cologne, DE
SUSE LINUX AG, Nuernberg, DE SUSE Labs (Head)

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