On Wed, Mar 07 2001, Rik van Riel wrote:
> Hi Linus,
>
> how would you feel about having the block device layer 64-bit
> capable, so Linux can have block devices of more than 2GB in
> size ?
>
> I know that 64-bit arithmetic is expensive on 32-bit platforms,
> but I have the idea there is a way around that for people who
> don't want 64-bit capable block devices.
>
> 1. use blkoff_t for all block number arithmetic
>
> 2. in some header file, have
>
> #ifdef CONFIG_BLKDEV_64BIT
> typedef long long blkoff_t
> #else
> typedef long blkoff_t
> #endif
>
> This way, people running smaller&slower machines can chose to
> do the cheaper 32-bit arithmetic and only the people using huge
> block devices will have to do the 64-bit arithmetic.
>
> (yes, basically the same trick as we're using for PAE)
I already did this here, or something similar at least. Using
a sector_t type that is 64-bit, regardless of platform. Is it
really worth it to differentiate and use 32-bit types for old
machines?
-- Jens Axboe- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Mar 07 2001 - 21:00:23 EST