Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 4 May 1997 09:28:16 -0400 | From | Eric Youngdale <> | Subject | Re: SCSI disk devices |
| |
One other thing - I was just looking through the latest kernel sources, and on i386, the dev_t is *still* 16 bits :-(. It isn't just i386 either - only the Alpha and PPC get this right. Someone needs to eventually take the initiative and fix the kernel so that it has new versions syscalls for *stat and mknod that support a larger dev_t. This does need to be coordinated with *lots* of other people to make sure that there are no other things that need to get changed at the same time, and to make sure that in fact the change is done correctly for the architecture in question.
Nonetheless, I think I am going to be forced to update the sd driver to dynamicly allocate additional major numbers so that people can have access to more than 16 disks. A system with 512 disks would use up 32 major numbers, so it is doable. The reason is that once the new syscalls are present in the kernel, then the C library would need to be updated, and then finally new versions of 'ls' 'mknod' and a few other utilities would be needed before people could use the new syscalls.
-Eric
| |