From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Jan 6 14:53:35 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.4/8.8.4) id OAA07119 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 6 Jan 1997 14:53:35 -0800 (PST) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.211]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.4/8.8.4) with SMTP id OAA07112 for ; Mon, 6 Jan 1997 14:53:29 -0800 (PST) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id PAA12827; Mon, 6 Jan 1997 15:43:21 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199701062243.PAA12827@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: more than 32 disks? To: henrich@crh.cl.msu.edu (Charles Henrich) Date: Mon, 6 Jan 1997 15:43:20 -0700 (MST) Cc: dg@root.com, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <199701052032.PAA03705@crh.cl.msu.edu> from "Charles Henrich" at Jan 5, 97 03:32:35 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > > unit number. This means that one will have to make driver changes to go > > beyond 32 units. :-( > > I noticed this pop up in relation to CD changers as well. I have a suggestion, > perhaps I'll even get a moment to write it (assuming people think this is a > good idea). During boot phase when DEVFS is probing around making devices, > change the format of the minor number to just be 11 bits for type, and then 21 > bits as an offset into a dynamically built kernel table (4 bytes/entry). This > gives us 2097152 different device possibilities.. Still a limit (I hate limits) > but far better than what we have today! Get rid of major and minor numbers entirely. They are unnecessary. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.