: .... Clearly a larger
: dev_t is needed, no matter how we do it. We need to somehow agree on how
: large this needs to be, and *then* we need to fix the filesystems so that
: they store a dev_t that is this large.
Yes. I think we do not have very much choice:
POSIX requires dev_t to be an arithmetic type (so it cannot be a struct),
which on Intel limits us to 64 bits.
Since changing is slow and painful it seems a bad idea to go to 32 bits
and have to change again a few years later.
On the other hand, not many C compilers support long long, so a 64-bit
dev_t would limit us to gcc. I don't know whether that would be a
problem for anybody.
Andries