Re: Minors remaining in Major 10 ??

[H. Peter Anvin]

Andre Hedrick wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 20 Jan 2001, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> 
> > Andre Hedrick wrote:
> > >
> > > HPA,
> > >
> > > Thoughts on granting all block subsystems a general access misc-char minor
> > > to do special service access that can not be down to a given device if it
> > > is open.  There are some things you can not do to a device if you are
> > > using its device-point to gain entry.  Also do the grab a neighboor and
> > > force the migration to find the desired major/minor is painful.
> > >
> >
> > Hmmm... this would be better done using a dedicated major (and then minor
> > = block major.)  This is something we can do in 2.5 once we have the
> > larger dev_t; at this point, I'd be really hesitant to allocate
> > additional that aren't obligatory.
> 
> Er, I did not make the point clear enough, drat.
> 
> mknod /dev/ide-service c 10 ???
> mknod /dev/scsi-service c 10 ???
> 
> These would be char devices that would allow one to pass a struct to an
> ioctl to do device or host services that normally have to attempted by
> opening the device desired.  This fails if you are trying to unload the
> driver (with KMOD enabled) so that you could switch devices or change
> driver types.  Yes this is the migration to a hotswap^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
> general host/device services calls.
> 

No, I think I understood perfectly well.  I said that if it's going to be
bound to each block device subsystem it would make more sense to
establish that tie explicitly -- if that isn't possible I'm a bit
confused.

	-hpa

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