Re: MMC block major dev

[Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>]

On Mer, 2004-09-01 at 22:55, Russell King wrote:
> Surely the same arguments also apply to character drivers as well?

Beats me but I had this argument before 1.0 was out and lost.

> >From what you're saying, any use of these dynamic majors what so
> ever is buggy.  So WTF do we have this facility in the kernel in
> the first place?

It makes sense if you have something truely managing your device space
like devfs or udev. 

> I suggest that someone submits a patch to rip out this apparantly
> buggy and useless feature, or at least make the kernel print a
> warning when its used such that people are aware of its dangerous
> nature.

Once everyone is using udev its useful. It also works out for devices
you never "give" to a user. The problem with MMC slots is they are the
kind of thing you want to hand out to a user on the console of a machine
in many situations.

> Of course, if you do rip out dynamic majors then you _will_ need
> to have an assigned major number for PCMCIA driver services, and
> probably a bunch of other stuff.

PCMCIA is very careful to create and remove its nodes and make sure they
don't ever become non root only.

> I also seem to remember hearing that we will only be using dynamically
> assigned device numbers in the new expanded device space.

If and when everyone has udev happy then yes - although LANANA is still
needed for name assignment between vendors. That or we give it to the
LSB, and personally I'd rather LANANA did it 8)

Alan