Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Tue, 15 May 2001 10:24:20 +0200 (CEST) | From | Geert Uytterhoeven <> | Subject | Re: LANANA: Getting out of hand? |
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On Mon, 14 May 2001, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Mon, 14 May 2001, Alan Cox wrote: > > Except that Linus wont hand out major numbers, which means I can't even boot > > simply off such a device. I bet the vendors in question dont think the sun > > shines out of linus backside any more. > > For example, the only thing you need in order to boot is to have a nice > clean "disk" major number. That's it. Nothing fancy, nothing more. > > Look at what we have now: > > - ramdisk: major 1. Fair enough - ramdisk is special, in that it doesn't > have any "real hardware". No problem. > - SCSI disks: > major 8, 65-71, > - Compaq smart2: > major 72-79 > - Compaq CISS: > major 104-111 > - DASD; > major 94 > - IDE: > major 3, 22, 33-34, 56-57, 88-91 > > and then the small random ones. > > NONE of these major numbers have _any_ redeeming qualities except for the > ramdisk. They should all be _one_ major number, namely "disk". There are > absolutely NO advantages to having separate devices for soem strange > compaq controllers and IDE disks. There is _no_ point in having some SCSI > disks show up at major 8, while others (who just happen to be attached to > a scsi bus that is not driven by the generic SCSI layer) show up at major > 104 or whatever.
[...]
> How hard is it to generate a new "disk driver framework", and let people > register themselves, kind of like the "misc" drivers do. Except we'd only > allow DISKS. You could add something like > > register_disk_driver("compaq-ciss", nr_disks, &my_queue); > > and then the disk driver framework will select a range of minor numbers > for the disks, and forward all requests that come to those minor numbers > to "my_queue". No major numbers. No fixed minors. And the user sees _one_ > disk major, and doesn't care _what_ the hell is behind it.
Looks exactly like what we used to do for serial ports on the m68k platform...
Gr{oetje,eeting}s,
Geert
-- Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org
In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that. -- Linus Torvalds
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