Re: Larger dev_t

[Linus Torvalds]

On Tue, 27 Mar 2001, Andre Hedrick wrote:
>
> Am I hearing you state you want dynamic device points and dynamic majors?

Yes and no.

We need static structures for user space - from a user perspective it
makes a ton more sense to say "I want to see all disks" than it does to
know that you have to do /dev/hd*, /dev/sd* plus all the extra magic
combinations that can happen (USB etc).

So in a sense what I'm arguing for is for _stricter_ device numbers to the
outside world.

But internally, it would be reasonably easy to make a mapping from those
user-visible numbers to a much looser version.

One example of this is going to happen very early in 2.5.x: the whole
"partitioning" stuff is going to go away from the driver, and into the
ll_rw_block layer as just another disk re-mapping thing. We already do
those kinds of re-mappings for LVM reasons anyway, and partitioning is not
something a disk driver should know about, really.

And that kind of partitioning mapping automatically means that we'd need
to remap minor numbers, and do it on a per-major basis (because the
partitioning mapping right now is not actually the same between SCSI and
IDE: IDE uses six bits of partitioning, while SCSI uses just four bits).
And once you do that, you might as well start "remapping" major numbers
too.

So let's say that you have two separate SCSI controllers - they would both
show up on major #8, and different minor numbers. Right now, for example,
controller 1 might have one disk, with minors 0-15 (for the whole disk and
15 partitions), and controller 2 might have two disks using minors 16-47.

As it stands now, the SCSI layer needs to do the remapping, and because
the SCSI layer does the remapping, nothing but SCSI layer devices can use
major #8.

But once you start doing partition mapping in ll_rw_block.c, you might as
well get rid of the notion that "SCSI is major 8". You could easily have
many different drivers, with many different queues, and remap them all to
have major 8 (and different minors) so that it looks simple for a user
that just wants to see SCSI disks.

Which is not to say that the same disk might not show up somewhere else
too, if anybody wants it to. The _driver_ should just know "unit x on
queue y", and then the driver might do whatever it wants (it might be, for
example, that the driver actually wants to show multiple controllers as
one queue, if the driver really wants to for some reason). And it should
be possible to have two drivers that really have no idea at ALL about each
other to just share the same major numbers.

			Linus