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SubjectRe: Lots of SCSI-disks, how?!
Mark H. Wood writes:
> On Wed, 22 Apr 1998, Richard Gooch wrote:
>
> > David Woodhouse writes:
> > >
> > > Richard.Gooch@atnf.CSIRO.AU said:
> > > > 16 SCSI discs is the limit because the Linux SCSI implementation
> > > > supports 16 partitions per disc. With 8 bit minor numbers, you can
> > > > only fit 16*16 (256) partitions and discs on a SCSI system.
> > >
> > > > One "solution" is to increase the minor number size, but that has
> > > > problems with C library compatibilities.
> > >
> > > I thought glibc supported 64 bit dev_t. The filesystems might have problems,
> > > though.
> >
> > There's still plently of people using libc 5 (and for good
> > reasons!). I think there's even people using libc 4. If 2.3 were to
> > introduce a 64 bit dev_t, it would stuff these people up, I think.
> > While you could perhaps argue that libc 4 is so ancient that it
> > doesn't have to be supported with kernel 2.3, I don't think libc 5
> > compatibility should be broken yet.
>
> Hey, I'm so cheap that I still have xv 3.00 (because it was the last
> freeware version) and it was compiled against libc 4. Actually I've got
> a fair amount of stuff that is still a.out and I've never found the
> time to hunt down sources and rebuild it. Should I be clearing my
> calendar for this task?

I rather we didn't break libc 4 compatibility if we can help it. I
don't recall hearing anyone say that they have plans to break
compatibility. As someone later pointed out, issues about kdev_t size
can be minimised by using process personalities (i.e. insert structure
rewriting code in certain syscalls). Doing stat on a device with major
> 256 or minor > 256 would yield a wrapped device number, which will
fould up some things.

However, see later comments in this thread about how we can survive
with 16 bits device numbers but *still* support a roomful of discs:
automagic generation of device numbers by devfs.

Regards,

Richard....

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