Re: LANANA: To Pending Device Number Registrants

James Simmons
2001-05-15T17:32:52Z

> > /dev/fbN, /dev/dspN, /dev/videoN, ...
>
> I still don't see why they couldn't be misc drivers?
>
> Sure, some of them already exist and all that, and we need to support
> their major numbers just for backwards compatibility reasons. But a simple
> "give me 16 minors, please" should work fine, together with minimal
> infrastructure to create the nodes.
>
> Think of the problem as a hot-plug issue. We don't want to statically
> allocate device numbers etc for hotplug - we create the nodes on an
> as-needed basis when the device is plugged in, and it's fairly easy to do
> with a /sbin/hotplug kind of approach.
>
> Static devices like /dev/fbN are no different. They were just plugged in
> before the OS booted.

Actually their are hotplug video cards. High end servers have hot swapable
graphcis cards. Would you want to take down a very important server
because the graphics card went dead. You pull it out and you plug a new
one in. Also their are PCMCIA video cards. I have seen them for the hand
held ipaqs. It is only a matter of time before all devices are hot
swappable.