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SubjectRe: More on bigger kdev_t
"H. Peter Anvin" wrote:
>
> Followup to: <UTC199910082128.XAA09266.aeb@papegaai.cwi.nl>
> By author: Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl
> In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
> >
> > Yes, but we also want to get rid of these arrays.
> > See, right now we have fixed arrays of length MAX_BLKDEV.
> > You do not want to throw away lots of memory and give these
> > length 65536 or so. You just want a driver_struct, and in this
> > structure one finds interesting things about the device, like
> > the blocksize and the readahead etc. And, by the way, also
> > the major and minor number.
> >
>
> Major number, definitely; I'm not sure about the minor number: for a
> lot of devices, the minor number is really a driver parameter.

Basically the main "parameter" passed as a minor number
is just the physical block size. And yes some drivers
are abusing the minor numbers to switch between in fact quite
different devices like for example IDE HD versus CD-ROM, but
if one goes after it anyway this could (or maybe even should?)
be fixed by giving them theyr own majors... At least
this would be the easiest fix in my oppinion. And it would be
nice to have just /dev/cd0 /dev/cd1 instead of the doublemening
of /dev/hdxxx.

If one has to go after every driver, one should take the opportunity
to resolve this I think.

--Marcin

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