Re: [PATCH 3/3] misc: use a proper range for minor number dynamicallocation

From: H. Peter Anvin
Date: Tue Dec 15 2009 - 17:42:52 EST


On 12/15/2009 02:34 PM, Andrew Morton wrote:
>>>>
>>>> The proposed solution uses the not yet reserved range from 64 to 127. If
>>>> more devices are needed, we may push 64 to 16.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Again, why not push these up above 256?
>>>
>>
>> I merged this patch, but made a note-to-self that there are remaining
>> open issues..
>
> And nothing else happened. Can we revisit this please?
>

There seem to be people still worried about breaking userspace with
majors/minors >= 256. I'm starting to think it is time to actually
break userspace, and dynamic majors/minors seem as good as any place to
start, especially since they by definition has to be managed by
something like udev. We have had large dev_t for something like six
years now, and most pieces of software isn't affected at all -- only the
stuff that manages /dev.

-hpa
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/