Re: [PATCH] kdevt-diff

[Roman Zippel]

Hi,

On Mon, 14 Apr 2003, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> > Linus, if you still want to go for a single block device major, this patch 
> > is bad idea (at least in this form).
> 
> I disagree.

Ok, here is a compromise proposal. I don't care very much about the MKDEV 
macro and almost nobody else should care about it either.
My main concern with a larger dev_t is that people start to go wild and 
waste the number range with crap. So what I'd like to see is some usage 
policy, e.g. nobody should assume a certain dev_t size, so that it's still 
possible to scale it down. If the user has only a small number of devices, 
they should be addressable even with a 16 bit dev_t.

BTW there are a few more functions missing, we need a dev_to_u32() and a 
dev_to_u16(), so e.g. file systems can do something useful in mknod if 
they can't store the complete number.

bye, Roman