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_.
Actually, it won't break *everything*; since the user-mode side has
already been prepared, it's only an kernel issue, and the number of
places it breaks will be large, but not impossible to do. I suspect a
number of device drivers won't be affected at all --- all it requires is
that the subsystem be written (or rewritten) to use proper macros.
I think the main problem is that it's grunt work that no one has
volunteered to go and do it. It's not particularly hard, it's just not
particularly uplifting.
- Ted
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