Re: [patch for playing] Patch to support 4000 disks and maintain backward compatibility

Joel Becker (Joel.Becker@oracle.com)
Fri, 11 Apr 2003 16:21:09 -0700

On Fri, Apr 11, 2003 at 03:14:32PM -0500, James Bottomley wrote:
> > Linux does not arbitrarily break old systems. The aim must be
> > to have all combinations of (old/new) kernel with (old/new) glibc
> > to work well in all situations where old kernel + old glibc worked.

100%

> Well, if you're going to do this, at least make it possible to tie all
> the sd devices to a single major (i.e. the numeric compatibility layer
> simply maps to the new single major scheme internally). It would also
> be nice for numeric compatibility to be a compile time option too...

The real issue is that almost all consumers of the new kernel
will have a /dev populated with old numbers. Only new installs
(completely fresh) won't be burdened. And new installs won't be the
majority of 2.6 users for quite some time after 2.6.0.

Joel

-- 


"Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research."
        - Wilson Mizner


Joel Becker
Senior Member of Technical Staff
Oracle Corporation
E-mail: joel.becker@oracle.com
Phone: (650) 506-8127
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