Re: lots and lots of disks again

viro
2004-02-11T22:53:52Z

On Wed, Feb 11, 2004 at 02:29:33PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Kurt Garloff <garloff@suse.de> wrote:
> >
> > We're fighting about a static 4k array currently ;-)
>
> yup. Sorry I was distracting.
>
> > Actually, I'm not sure we currently have the right discussion here.
>
> Absolutely.
>
> I was rather hoping that Al would follow up on his comments yesterday
> actually.

OK. Proposed "sparse" partition numbers are Bad Idea(tm), for the same
reasons why 255.255.252.240 is not a good netmask for a subnet in class B.
It might be possible to handle if we do a single ->probe() for entire
major and put the smarts into it (about the only way to do that, actually),
but we'll have a hell of time hunting down all places assuming that
device number == first device number + partition number. Note that we
are talking about late-boot code, fs/partition/*, anything that calls
bdget_disk(), etc. _And_ unknown amount of userland code. And code that
exports information to userland (e.g. /proc/paritions or sysfs per-disk
subtrees).

Unless somebody has a good idea of the modifications involved and is willing
to describe them (_not_ on usual aeb level of handwaving, please), I consider
that idea as non-feasible.