Re: support of older compilers

[Grzegorz Kulewski <kangur@polcom.net>]

> The kernel does do more these days than it did in '95. But 6 times more? I
> dunno..

Can't we remove ramfs for a good start? Everyone should use tmpfs instead 
and some stupid distributions (I will not tell their names) try to mount 
ramfs on /dev (udev) and that leads to very stupid panic if you will 
write for example:

dd if=/dev/evms/sda5 of=/dev/sda17 bs=1024

instead of "of=/dev/evms/sda17".

Explanation (if anybody needs one):
Kernel can't create more partition devices than 15 for SCSI and SATA disks 
because of lack of minor numbers. So I am using evms to create these 
devices. So I should use /dev/evms/sda* for these partitions. And if I 
will not remember to do so then I will get oom panic very shortly because 
ramfs is not limited (in contrary to tmpfs).

And this kind of stupid mistake can happen. It happened to me 3 times in a 
row before I started to debug what is wrong with this kernel.

[BTW. Does somebody know how to tell the kernel that I do not want 
/dev/sda[0-9]* files (but I do want /dev/hda files) created == I do not 
want kernel partition driver to touch this particular device?]

And using ramfs for anything else can easily lead to similar problems. So 
I think we do not need ramfs. Am I wrong? [I understand that removing it 
will not remove much code.]


Thanks,

Grzegorz Kulewski