Hi,
On Tue, Apr 11, 2006 at 12:53:20PM +0900, Bdale Garbee wrote:
> The major and minor numbers used by your patch in bug report #347473 do not
> seem consistent with the Documentation/devices.txt in recent 2.6 kernel source
> trees. What's the story?
The story is pretty simple.
I guess that at the beginning of the em8300 driver, the author used a
major number (121) dedicated to "LOCAL/EXPERIMENTAL USE". Then, I guess
the userspace grew too large to have it changed...
Moreover, at some point in the past, someone got minor numbers (204-207)
allocated in major 10. I don't know who asked for this, but it is not
very useful, since it means that one would only be able to use one such
card at a time, while I several people use several such cards
simultaneously.
More recently, I added the driver a new major parameter that allows a
user to choose a different major number, in case 121 would already be
used for something else. Moreove, it also allows to use an
dynamically-allocated number, for those who use devfs or udev.
But some people still use static /dev with their good old
/dev/em8300{,_ma,_mv,_sp} devices using major 121, and I'd rather not
break compatibility for those.
Can you think of a nice way to handle this?
Cheers,
Nicolas
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
