Re: [RFC 2/4] firewire: dynamic cdev allocation below firewire major

[Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>]

On Sun, 2006-02-12 at 22:51 -0500, Jody McIntyre wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 02, 2006 at 11:40:12PM +0100, Johannes Berg wrote:
> > This  patch implements dynamic minor number allocation below the 171
> > major allocated for ieee1394. Since on today's systems one doesn't need
> > to have fixed device numbers any more we could just use any, but it's
> > probably still useful to use the ieee1394 major number for any firewire
> > related devices (like mem1394).
> 
> I don't really like this.  There's no benefit to using the 1394 major
> number.  I'd rather see an improved alloc_chrdev_region() that does
> something like this but for the whole kernel (currently it "wastes" an
> entire major even if you only want 1 minor, and for what you're doing,
> grabbing 1 minor at a time makes the most sense.)


why bother? There's a LOT of majors nowadays (12 bits) so... what's the
problem with keeping the kernel side simple?
(it's not as if userspace needs to care about the exact numbers anyway
for almost everything)