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Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 15:56:23 -0800 (PST)
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>
To: Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl
cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] kill i_dev
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On Fri, 22 Nov 2002 Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl wrote:
> 
> The i_dev field is deleted and the few uses are replaced
> by i_sb->s_dev.

Applied.

> There is a single side effect: a stat on a socket now sees
> a nonzero st_dev. There is nothing against that - FreeBSD
> has a nonzero value as well - but there is at least one
> utility (fuser) that will need an update.

Looking at the patch (not testing it), as far as I can tell we'll return a 
basically random number that is just whatever the anonymous super-block 
was allocated, right?

I'm not convinced that returning random numbers to user space is
necessarily a great idea.. That said, I think we already do it for unnamed
pipes anyway, so I'm more wondering if we should have some way to map
these numbews (in user space) to a valid thing, so that they wouldn't just
be random numbers.

(In other words: I like the patch, and I'm not really complaining about
this new behavour at all. It's just the "randomness" as far as user space
goes that bothers me a bit, since it seems to imply bad interface design).

		Linus

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