Re: udev and devfs - The final word

Eric W. Biederman
2004-01-05T05:32:35Z

viro@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk writes:

> On Sun, Jan 04, 2004 at 08:02:20PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > Now, we'd probably not want to force the switch, but I do suspect we'll
> > have exactly this as a switch in the "Kernel Debugging Config" section.
> > Where even _common_ things like disks could end up with per-bootup values.
> > Just to verify that every part of the system ends up having it right.
>
> Then we'd better have a very good idea of the things that are going to
> break. Note that right now even late-boot code in kernel itself will
> break on that - there are explicit checks for ROOT_DEV==MKDEV(2,0),
> all sorts of weird crap deep in the bowels of arch/ppc/*/*, etc.

/sbin/lilo and possibly some of the other bootloaders. Relationships
between devices are a challenge to work with. How do you go from a
partition to it's actual block device etc. I don't remember how many
major numbers lilo has hard coded, I just remember looking at it once
and realizing I couldn't think of a better way to accomplish what it
was trying to do.

Eric