Re: possible SCSI device numbering solution

Harald Koenig (koenig@tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de)
Tue, 25 Jun 1996 10:11:07 +0200 (MET DST)

> > There is little point going through the disruption that changing it would
> > be, to change it again, so we may as well go to a 64 bit dev_t. One
> > thing tho, would we even need more than 65536 major devices? ie 16 bit
> > major, 48 bit minor (or 281474976710656 minor numbers (2.8*10^14) ;)
>
> I'm reminded of somebody saying, "they'll never need more than 640k". :-/
>
> But anyhoot, 16/48 bit majors/minors seems reasonable to me.
> Of course, this is a blind guess - we really should discuss how
> majors/minors will be assigned and used first. We could easily gobble up
> 128-bits with a poor system, or, improve the current one and stick with
> 16-bits.

any idea how the "ls -l" output should look like for larger dev_t ?

crw-r----- 1 root kmem 1, 2 Aug 29 1992 /dev/kmem
brw-rw---- 1 root root 65535, 281474976710655 Apr 1 2001 /dev/last_dev_16_48
brw-rw---- 1 root root 4294967295, 4294967295 Apr 1 2001 /dev/last_dev_32_32
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 0 May 4 1994 /dev/sda

doesn't look too nice ;-)

Harald

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