Re: Larger dev_t

Guest section DW
2001-03-26T23:42:48Z

On Mon, Mar 26, 2001 at 01:18:06PM -0800, John Byrne wrote:

> Do you have any interest in doing away with the concept of major and
> minor numbers altogether; turning the dev_t into an opaque unique id?
>
> At the application level, the kinds of information that is derived from
> the major/minor number should probably be derived in some other manner
> such as a library or system call. Code that determines device type by
> comparing with the major/minor numbers should probably be discouraged in
> the long run and this could be a good time to start.

Programs that use explicit major/minor information are probably broken
or at least very nonportable.
On the other hand, unfortunately the Unix API has a few explicit
occurrences of major/minor. For example, one has ls(1) and mknod(1).