Re: LANANA: Getting out of hand?

Geert Uytterhoeven
2001-05-15T08:26:28Z

On Mon, 14 May 2001, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Mon, 14 May 2001, Alan Cox wrote:
> > Except that Linus wont hand out major numbers, which means I can't even boot
> > simply off such a device. I bet the vendors in question dont think the sun
> > shines out of linus backside any more.
>
> For example, the only thing you need in order to boot is to have a nice
> clean "disk" major number. That's it. Nothing fancy, nothing more.
>
> Look at what we have now:
>
> - ramdisk: major 1. Fair enough - ramdisk is special, in that it doesn't
> have any "real hardware". No problem.
> - SCSI disks:
> major 8, 65-71,
> - Compaq smart2:
> major 72-79
> - Compaq CISS:
> major 104-111
> - DASD;
> major 94
> - IDE:
> major 3, 22, 33-34, 56-57, 88-91
>
> and then the small random ones.
>
> NONE of these major numbers have _any_ redeeming qualities except for the
> ramdisk. They should all be _one_ major number, namely "disk". There are
> absolutely NO advantages to having separate devices for soem strange
> compaq controllers and IDE disks. There is _no_ point in having some SCSI
> disks show up at major 8, while others (who just happen to be attached to
> a scsi bus that is not driven by the generic SCSI layer) show up at major
> 104 or whatever.

[...]

> How hard is it to generate a new "disk driver framework", and let people
> register themselves, kind of like the "misc" drivers do. Except we'd only
> allow DISKS. You could add something like
>
> register_disk_driver("compaq-ciss", nr_disks, &my_queue);
>
> and then the disk driver framework will select a range of minor numbers
> for the disks, and forward all requests that come to those minor numbers
> to "my_queue". No major numbers. No fixed minors. And the user sees _one_
> disk major, and doesn't care _what_ the hell is behind it.

Looks exactly like what we used to do for serial ports on the m68k platform...

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
-- Linus Torvalds