On Sat, 21 Jun 1997, John F. Woods wrote:

> There may be a more pleasant way.  As someone pointed out, device numbers are
> currently 16 bits, but they're stored in a 32 bit field.[1]  If the size of
> a device number is an attribute of a filesystem, then you could simply have
> a per-filesystem flag telling whether to unpack the device number as 16 or
> 32 bits.

I don't beleive we're talking about the same problem. If we move
to 16 partitions per disklabel, the obvious numbering scheme would
have minor nos. 0-15 for sd0, 16-32 for sd1, etc., but that's
incompatable with our current scheme, 0-7 for sd0, 8-15 for sd1,
etc. So if you boot up with the `wrong' kernel, you may end up
mounting partitions from sd0 instead of sd1, or mounting sd1 when
you meant to mount sd2, or whatever.

cjs

Curt Sampson    cjs@portal.ca		Info at http://www.portal.ca/
Internet Portal Services, Inc.		`And malt does more than Milton can
Vancouver, BC   (604) 257-9400		 To justify God's ways to man.'