|> (But a device is identified by the device number (a dev_t).
|> Roughly speaking it is never the business of user space
|> dividing this up into major and minor. So, every user space program
|> that uses the definitions of MAJOR and MINOR is broken.
That is true, but in a difference sense. The correct way is to use
the major/minor/makedev functions. No need to poke into the kernel
headers.
|> In practice however there are a few programs that rely
|> on a particular structure, like mknod, or ls, or lilo.)
Wrong. None of these programs rely in any way on a particular structure
of dev_t. They use the major/minor accessor function and the makedev
contructor function. How the values are encoded in dev_t values is
completely opaque to them.
-- Andreas Schwab "And now for something SuSE Labs completely different." schwab@suse.de SuSE GmbH, Schanzäckerstr. 10, D-90443 Nürnberg- 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/