Re: any chance we could dump the 64k subdirectory limit before 2.4

From: Alan Cox (alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk)
Date: Sat May 27 2000 - 11:58:55 EST


> > Insane amount of padding around dev_t? It seems we are going
>
> This is just dumb. Huge dev_t is useless because, after a certain
> point, we need a dynamic /dev anyway. (with or without devfs)
> Even if trillions of /dev/* files were reasonable, we still need to
> deal with modern dynamic hardware -- soon it will all be like USB.

And you still need a dev_t for that

> We can live with 16 bits until somebody actually has 60 thousand
> active pieces of hardware on one machine.

It'll happen. There are people running Linux on machines where 60,000 active
_users_ is not regarded as unusual [active being 'has done something in the
last 60 seconds']

> There is no need for that. Traditional backup tools can't handle
> /dev in a world with dynamic hardware, so why bother? We only need
> to provide random numbers to fill in struct stat. (zero works)

You need the device stat for things other than backups

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