Re: [RFC PATCH] vfs: Use 12:20 bit major:minor in stat everywhere

From: Al Viro
Date: Tue Mar 03 2015 - 20:47:38 EST


On Tue, Mar 03, 2015 at 05:37:31PM -0800, Gwendal Grignou wrote:
> At least, to base the device format on whether we are running on a 32
> bit or 64 bit architecture does not make sense.

Yes, it does. Note that on 32bit ones stat64(2) *will* return an arbitrary
value. On 64bit ones stat(2) will.

> If a tool calling stat(2) can not handle 12 bit major/20 bits minor,
> it would already break or about to break when running on a 64 bit
> machine.
>
> Regarding SCSI, the 17th disk will use SCSI_DISK1_MAJOR (65). Only the
> 257th disk will use the first scsi major (8) again and need a minor
> greater than 256. (see sd_major() in drivers/scsi/sd.c for details).

*nod*

It's been years since I last looked at sd.c, TBH...

Said that, with NFS it's definitely a minor per superblock, and it's not the
only set_anon_super() user. Having a bunch of filesystems mounted over NFS
will suffice...
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/