Followup to: <39C15017.E8B2FC03@mit.edu>
By author: Matt Yourst <yourst@mit.edu>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> >
> >I am working on a project that is going to find the current limit of
> >16-bits for device numbers to be a pain. While looking around in the
> >linux-kernel archive, ...
> >
> This is the whole reason Linux 2.4 uses devfs (device filesystem) -
> there is no need to use device numbers; you just register the name in
> the /dev/whatever namespace and it's done. (The kernel will assign a
> unique old-style 16-bit number for compatibility purposes as needed.)
> See linux/Documentation/filesystems/devfs/README for the full story.
>
This is a nice fable, but that's pretty much all it is. Your user
space is going to puke all over you if you try to mess with this.
The right solution, a larger dev_t, *WILL* be implemented in 2.5.
-hpa
-- <hpa@transmeta.com> at work, <hpa@zytor.com> in private! "Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot." http://www.zytor.com/~hpa/puzzle.txt - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Sep 15 2000 - 21:00:24 EST