[1803] in linux-scsi channel archive
Re: kerneld
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Eric Youngdale)
Sat May 3 19:21:38 1997
Date: Sat, 3 May 1997 19:19:16 -0400
From: Eric Youngdale <eric@andante.jic.com>
To: richard@stommel.tamu.edu
CC: tmw20@cam.ac.uk, linux-scsi@vger.rutgers.edu
In-reply-to: <199705021821.NAA20108@stommel.tamu.edu> (message from Richard
Henderson on Fri, 2 May 1997 13:21:27 -0500 (CDT))
>Not at present. The scsi subsystem will only probe for a host adaptor
>if there are none present. Furthermore, it is sd.o that is associated
>with block-major-8, so there's not really any place to hook on.
>
>Perhaps one of the scsi folk can comment on the advisability of probing
>for additional host adaptors if a device beyond the number currently
>detected is opened. And if it is not evil, whereabouts would be a good
>place to hook on.
Interesting question. I just rigged my simulator to pretend
to have 70 disks and see if it actually happened. It seemed to detect
all 70 disks - the only glitch is that the sd[a-z] naming is broken
past the 26th device, and it keeps going past 'z' into the graphics
and international character set. A minor annoyance that needs to be
fixed, but it shouldn't limit people. With more disks, it would have
eventually wrapped around into the control characters, and then back
to 'a' again.
I believe the *only* problem is that there is no way to
actually *talk* to any device past the 16th with the current size of
dev_t. The disk code is just indexing into a table that is generated
when the devices are scanned, and it is using the minor number as the
index.
-Eric
