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Date: Fri, 07 Dec 2001 15:12:59 -0800
From: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
Organization: Zytor Communications
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To: andersen@codepoet.org
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Subject: Re: On re-working the major/minor system
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Erik Andersen wrote:

> On Fri Dec 07, 2001 at 02:04:42PM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> 
>>It's clear a painful change is needed.  **We don't have a choice.**
>>However, the fewer places we have to make source code changes the better.
>>
> 
> Sure.  I'm not arguing again the change.  Just making sure
> everyone 100% understands that we have just thown any prayer of
> binary compatibility with anything less then 2.5.x....
> 
> But lets look on the bright side though.  Since we are going to
> be having a flag day _anyways_ we may as well make the most of
> it.  I can think of 20 things off the top of my head that are
> being retained in the name of binary cmpatibilty that can easily
> move to the trash bucket.  :)
> 
> For example, I would _love_ for Linux to standardize syscall
> numbers across all architectures, guarantee that userspace gets
> the exact same stack setup for all arches, we might as well fixup
> proc, etc, etc, etc.
> 


Not going to happen.  Linux deliberately choose against that, because in
Linux, syscall numbers are generally (except x86) compatible with the
dominant vendor Unix on the platform.

> 
> That works, and should prevent most major problems.  Hmm.  At
> least for cpio there are 6 chars worth of device info in there,
> so we coule easily go to 48 bits without RPM problems.  Or redhat
> could fix rpm to use tarballs like debs do, and then we could go
> to 64 bit devices no problem.
> 


The big stubling block seems to be NFSv2.

	-hpa


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