Re: Linux v2.5.40 - and a feature freeze reminder

[Linus Torvalds]

On Tue, 1 Oct 2002, Alexander Viro wrote:
> 
> Umm...  Speaking of 32bit dev_t, I'd rather do it right way.

Hey, if you drive that part, I'll be very happy. 

I don't doubt you can fix up the block device handling quite nicely by 
now, but I worry about all the other crud, including how to make the 
interfaces be backwards-compatible etc, and making sure we convert 
correctly in all the right places.

The explicit dev_t<->kdev_t conversion has fixed only a subset of the
problems, and we still use dev_t as keys into things (ie we have this
notion that two different dev_t never map to the same "bdev *", for
example - which totally breaks aliases etc).

There's also all the user-level interfaces for dev_t, and the disk layout 
interfaces used by various filesystems.

We can easily make kdev_t be 32-bit, but without a 32-bit dev_t that 
doesn't help much.

			Linus