Re: USB device allocation

Peter Samuelson (psamuels@sampo.creighton.edu)
Wed, 6 Oct 1999 06:22:33 -0500 (CDT)


[Martin Dalecki <dalecki@cs.net.pl>]
> And one should cure the disease (too short dev_t) instead of the
> symptoms (inventing devfs).

Ah, but devfs *does* cure the disease. (It has the distinction of
being the only such cure so far, not counting vaporware.) If used in
no-compatibility mode, it can dynamically assign 32-bit device numbers,
without any major/minor split. Are you suggesting that someone out
there has need for more than 1<<32 device nodes?

And before you complain that this breaks compatibility with someone
(LILO and rdev need to be taught not to hardcode root dev numbers in),
remember that a bigger kdev_t carries the same disadvantage.

-- 
Peter Samuelson
<sampo.creighton.edu!psamuels>

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