Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 21 Apr 2003 11:44:59 -0700 (PDT) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] new system call mknod64 |
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On Mon, 21 Apr 2003, Christoph Hellwig wrote: > > Just think s/major/dev_lo/g and s/minor/dev_hi/g. This is the > represantation for a legacy protocol. Just because fat thinks > of a filename as 8+3 Linux filenames don't have to be that format.
Yes, we could make dev_t's internally be always 32+32, and do the marshalling at stat() time. That would actually be my preferred approach, and would solve some of the problems with using "dev_t" as an opaque type right now (ie it would solve the "discontiguous region" issue.
> Umm, no. You're far to major/minor biased to realized live get a lot > sipler for use if we don't do any complicated mapping of old dev_t > to the larger dev_t.
We HAVE to do the mapping somewhere. Old applications only use the lower 16 bits, and that's just something that MUST NOT be broken.
The question is only _where_ (not whether) we do the mapping. Right now we keep "dev_t" in teh same format as we give back to user space, and thus we always map into that format internally. But we don't have to: we can have an internal format that is different from the one we show users.
Linus
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