Re: [PATCH] register_blkdev

[Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>]

On Sat, Mar 08, 2003 at 09:26:15PM +0100, Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl wrote:
> There is no need to do all of that. Going to 32-bit dev_t
> is trivial, not a major restructuring.

Doing it _right_ does require major restructuring. 

> However, it can be crashed from userspace, so before we do
> the three minutes editing the audit is needed.
> Look at the patch for raw.c I posted a few hours ago.
> One trivial test.

And probably one of them in at least half of the character drivers.  We need
to get rid of the artifical major/minor split completly instead of just
increasing it, leaving silly assumptions in and increasing the space consumed
by all those arrays by magnitudes.

> > If people really think they need a 32bit dev_t
> > we should just introduce it and use it only for block devices
> > and stay with the old 8+8 split for character devices.
> 
> Of course discussing the future and how the cake should
> be divided once we have it may be of interest

No, the point is that the character devices aren't ready yet for moving
away from the old 8+8 split.