Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 8 Dec 1999 20:52:58 -0500 (EST) | From | Alexander Viro <> | Subject | Re: Binary drivers |
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On Wed, 8 Dec 1999, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
> How about open-source stuff that *isn't* shipped with the kernel? (VMware's > drivers (?), iBCS (not that it accesses drivers directly --- I think), etc.)
Want a lovely story about undead suckitude?
Back in July '94 (1.1.35, IIRC), when Linux did not support block sizes other than 1024, somebody had thought that it would be cool to have swapfiles on FAT filesystems. Instead of doing the right thing the new interface was added: ->smap(). Same as bmap(), but works on sectors instead of blocks. Great. Fortunately, somebody else _did_ the right thing and did the support for other block sizes (late October '94, 1.1.60). At that moment ->smap() became obsolete. Especially since for FAT blocksize immediately became 512 bytes. All nice and dandy, everything happened within one development branch, so ->smap() was goner, right? Like hell it was. FPOS lingered around until _NOW_. Killed in 2.3.30-pre7. Should it be left around forever? I don't think so. Sorry. If it means recompile - so be it.
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