Because "struct device" generally is not related to a major:minor pairWell, OK, but AFAIK, your long-term plan is to merge class_device and device, so in the long-term perspective it does not matter. And those who do not need a character device support may have a possibility to disable it.
at all. That is what a struct class_device is for. Lots of struct
device users have nothing to do with a char device, and some have
multiple char devices associated with a single struct device.
All that being said, yes, there is a disconnect between the driver modelWill see. At this point my knowledge and understanding is not so deep, so I don't think I'm able to provide decent patches. May be in future. For now I'm only wondering.
parts and the char subsystem. It's been something that I've wanted to
fix for a number of years, but never had the time to do so. If you want
to work toward doing this, I'd be glad to review any patches.