Re: Larger dev_t

[Martin Dalecki]

Alan Cox wrote:
> 
> > Exactly. It's just that for historical reasons, I think the major for
> > "disk" should be either the old IDE or SCSI one, which just can show more
> > devices. That way old installers etc work without having to suddenly start
> > knowing about /dev/disk0.
> 
> They will mostly break. Installers tend to parse /proc/scsi and have fairly
> complex ioctl based relationships based on knowing ide v scsi.
> 
> /dev/disc/ is a little un-unix but its clean

Why do you worry about installers? New distro - new kernel - new
installer
that's they job to worry about it. They will change the installer anyway
and this kind of change actually is going to simplyfy the code there, I
think,
a bit.

Just kill the old device major suddenly and place it in the changelog
of the new kernel that the user should mknod and add it to /dev/fstab
before rebooting into the new kernel. Hey that's developement anyway :-)
If the developer boots back into the old kernel just other mounts
 in /dev/fstab will fail no problem for transition here in sight...