Re: [PATCH] block/ub.c: Increase number of partitions for usb storage

[Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>]

On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 08:24:12PM -0700, Pete Zaitcev wrote:
> On Tue, 2 May 2006 14:59:52 +0200, Hans A Eide <haeide@usit.uio.no> wrote:
> 
> > I do backups to external USB storage and hit the 8 partitions limit  
> > of ub.c
> > This could also be a problem for others (HFS+ formatted iPods?)
> 
> It was a bad mistake in retrospect. I limited ub to 8 partitions
> because I wanted to fit 26 devices into 8 bits of minor.
> 
> > Any reason for not increasing the partitions limit to 16?
> 
> Doing so would not be compatible for systems which do not run udevd.
> Linus forbade such changes, and I agree. So, if we strongly needed
> ub to go beyond 1+7 partitions, we would need some kind of a remapping
> scheme. I have to discuss this with Greg or Harald. Making dis-
> contiguous nodes is easy with mknod, but I do not know if udev
> supports it.

udev can handle it just fine, as it just looks at the sysfs "dev" file
to get the major:minor numbers.  It knows nothing about "ranges" :)

thanks,

greg k-h