From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261727AbTDKUDq (for ); Fri, 11 Apr 2003 16:03:46 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261722AbTDKUDq (for ); Fri, 11 Apr 2003 16:03:46 -0400 Received: from nat9.steeleye.com ([65.114.3.137]:10500 "EHLO hancock.sc.steeleye.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261719AbTDKUDB (for ); Fri, 11 Apr 2003 16:03:01 -0400 Subject: Re: [patch for playing] Patch to support 4000 disks and maintain backward compatibility From: James Bottomley To: Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl Cc: Linux Kernel , SCSI Mailing List , pbadari@us.ibm.com In-Reply-To: References: Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Ximian Evolution 1.0.8 (1.0.8-9) Date: 11 Apr 2003 15:14:32 -0500 Message-Id: <1050092073.2078.219.camel@mulgrave> Mime-Version: 1.0 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Fri, 2003-04-11 at 14:45, Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl wrote: > I think compatibility is very important. > Linux does not arbitrarily break old systems. The aim must be > to have all combinations of (old/new) kernel with (old/new) glibc > to work well in all situations where old kernel + old glibc worked. Well, if you're going to do this, at least make it possible to tie all the sd devices to a single major (i.e. the numeric compatibility layer simply maps to the new single major scheme internally). It would also be nice for numeric compatibility to be a compile time option too... It's also possible that SCSI may not be the only consumer of such a compatibility layer (IDE also has multiple majors), so it may be worthwhile putting it somewhere more globally useful (like fs/block_dev.c) James