[...]
> This is why I get quite passionate about misinformation being spread.
> Horst KNOWS what the benefits are but seems to cling to the notion
> that because it is a minor change for the way he does things that
> it is necessarily bad.
Yes, I know what possible benefits are. I also consider what the costs are,
and I think they are much larger than the benefits.
> He failed to mention what happens when we run
> out of maj/mins, when you have
Though luck. Then you must redesign the kernel's guts, and a largeish part
of userspace. And recompile everything with another way of handling
devices, be it 64 bit dev_t's or some other scheme. BTW, the work for
enabling larger dev_t's has been done a long time ago (2.1 something, or
even much earlier). AFAIU, glibc is also prepared for a larger dev_t. The
big problem is doing it, as it will break _everything_.
> sda, sdb, and sdc, and you remove sdb... Whoops, sdc is sdb!!! Not
> with devfs, it addresses devices by hardware address when applicable,
> and provides symlinks to the oldstyle names like /dev/sdb.
You are just shifting one naming convention to another one, that is as bad
or worse. No win there.
> I'm not going to go into how difficult PCMCIA, USB, et all is w/out
> something as elegant as devfs.
OK, this is the only argument you've got left. If you won't go into it, it
surely means that it isn't really that solid. Case closed.
-- Dr. Horst H. von Brand mailto:vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl Departamento de Informatica Fono: +56 32 654431 Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria +56 32 654239 Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile Fax: +56 32 797513- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/