To reply to an old message that got buried,

> Date: Sat, 21 Jun 1997 21:24:08 -0400 (EDT)

>> Unnecessary. Note that you can distinguish old and new trivially, by
>> the expedient of noting that the top 16 bits of old are always zero.
>> This means that /dev/console (as 0,0) is the only special case you
>> have to worry about.

> that's not entirely accurate...you actually need to worry about
> anything with a major number of 0.  this would include the block
> interfaces for the wd? devices.

I'd suggest that at the same point at which we go to 32 bits, we
forever reserve major number 0 for compatability, either with 16-bit
device numbers or with other-OS compatability (eg, SunOS, HP-UX,
Linux).  This means moving anything currently using major number zero,
but that seems to me to be less of a problem than the alternative.
This also makes it easy to deal with, for example, a future move to
64-bit dev_ts, because 64-major 0 will be 32-bit and 16-bit
compatability, and we won't have to fiddle the *devsw tables again.

					der Mouse

			       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
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