> Problem with this is, I can eventually see us actually _using_up_ a thousand
> device entries if we have a Grand Unified Table.  And by that time, every
> port's table would be 99% nulls.  What's the point?

maybe.  i'd be interested to see what the numbers look like right now.
You can generalize how things will get as you add ports.

Even if we use 1000 device entries -- which i doubt -- your 99% number
is nonsical unless we had 100 ports, and still wouldn't work out
because of shared devices.

And, even if we used up a thousand entries, that still only 1/4 the
entries we've currently got -- 4k entries -- and (on 32-bit machines)
still only 4k for the whole table!


It's not clear to me that that's 'fat', and it certainly wouldn't be
'slow'.  (You said that if we wanted "fast-and-lean.")

Rather than fast and lean, i'd like fast, lean, and easy to maintain.
8-)


chris