Re: Patch for 256 disks in 2.4

[Christoph Hellwig]

On Mon, Jul 22, 2002 at 04:48:56PM -0400, Pete Zaitcev wrote:
> > I've written a patch for sd that makes the allocation of majors
> > dynamic. The driver just takes 8 at sd_init and further majors are 
> > allocated when disks are attached. Which saves a lot of memory for
> > all the gendisk and hd_struct stuff in case you do not have a lot of 
> > SCSI disks connected. The patch does support up to 160 SD majors, 
> > though currently, it won't succeed getting more than 132 majors.
> 
> That's wonderful, but we cannot ship that. There is no userland
> support to create device nodes in dynamic fashion and to ensure
> that they do not conflict. This is why Arjan filed for and received
> additional majors. Dynamic solutions need some time to float about
> the community, I think.

I might be stupid, but it looks to me like we want both the new majors
and the kernel structs dynamically allocated when they get actually used..