From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261942AbTDUTud (ORCPT ); Mon, 21 Apr 2003 15:50:33 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261962AbTDUTud (ORCPT ); Mon, 21 Apr 2003 15:50:33 -0400 Received: from neon-gw-l3.transmeta.com ([63.209.4.196]:29191 "EHLO neon-gw.transmeta.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261942AbTDUTub (ORCPT ); Mon, 21 Apr 2003 15:50:31 -0400 Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2003 13:02:48 -0700 (PDT) From: Linus Torvalds To: viro@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk cc: Christoph Hellwig , Roman Zippel , "David S. Miller" , , Subject: Re: [PATCH] new system call mknod64 In-Reply-To: <20030421193510.GQ10374@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Mon, 21 Apr 2003 viro@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk wrote: > > stat() family, ustat(2), quota syscall, ioctls that pass device numbers, > /dev/raw, RAID, probably process accounting. > > FWIW, I believe that you are overestimating the amount of internal code > that cares about device numbers. I don't think so. I agree that it's not very many places, and in fact the reason we currently do _not_ do dev_t replacement at system call boundary is that it looks to be so rare that it's easier to always use the user representation, and then always do the explicit MINOR/MAJOR in the places that use dev_t. I don't really care which way it is done (ie system call boundary or in usage), and I'm happy with either - as long as it always _does_ get done, and nobody ever uses the user representation that can have aliases for anything important. (My preference, quite frankly, is to always have major/minor be explicit, and never deal with "dev_t" at all. Especially with a 64-bit dev_t it is actually often _faster_ and _simpler_ to just carry major/minor around explicitly because then gcc won't ever have to worry it's small deficient brain about "unsigned long long".) Linus