In some email I received from Greg A. Woods, sie wrote:
> [ On Sunday, October 15, 2000 at 18:03:33 (+0200), Lennart Augustsson wrote: ]
> > Subject: Port independent cdevsw[]
> >
> > Why do we have a cdevsw[] and bdevsw[] for each port?  Purely historical
> > reasons I'd say.  It's a real nuisance.  Whenever you add a MI device
> > driver you have to change far to many places.  You need to update the
> > conf.c file for all ports that can have the device, and then the MAKEDEV
> > for the corresponding ports.  This is annoying and error prone.
> 
> IIRC it's because ports try to keep major/minor compatible with the
> original vendor-supplied OS for that platform....

I know I'm going to regret asking this, but are there any programs which
make this actually necessary ?  Does dump, on SunOS4/Ultrix check that the
major number is between x and y ?  I would have thought that it was more
important to support an identical naming scheme in addition to supporting
whether it was a block or character or other type of file.  To me, it would
be one bad ass program if it actually checked what a particular major of a
device in /dev was.

Darren