From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Apr 24 09:30:48 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id JAA29037 for hackers-outgoing; Wed, 24 Apr 1996 09:30:48 -0700 (PDT) Received: from gateway.zeus.leitch.com (gateway.zeus.leitch.com [205.210.38.6]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id JAA29032 for ; Wed, 24 Apr 1996 09:30:45 -0700 (PDT) Received: from tap.zeus.leitch.com (tap.zeus.leitch.com [204.187.60.10]) by gateway.zeus.leitch.com (8.6.12/8.6.9) with ESMTP id MAA23795 for ; Wed, 24 Apr 1996 12:42:36 -0400 Received: from ale.zeus.leitch.com (ale.zeus.leitch.com [204.187.61.65]) by tap.zeus.leitch.com (8.6.12/8.6.6) with ESMTP id MAA16773; Wed, 24 Apr 1996 12:31:19 -0400 From: Dave Chapeskie Received: (dchapes@localhost) by ale.zeus.leitch.com (8.6.12/8.6.9) id MAA06404; Wed, 24 Apr 1996 12:31:19 -0400 Message-Id: <199604241631.MAA06404@ale.zeus.leitch.com> Subject: Character device major numbers. To: FreeBSD-hackers@freebsd.org Date: Wed, 24 Apr 1996 12:31:19 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL14 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Hello all, I have a problem I hope someone can help me with. The company I work for is using FreeBSD a new product. We've written three device drivers to support some custom cards that the product needs to use. The problem is that there is only one reserved cdev major number. IMHO, It doesn't make sense for my company to go through the effort of making the drivers loadable to sidestep the major number issue since the product is a complete system and we provide a prebuilt kernel and the drivers will be in constant use while the system is in use. It also doesn't make sense to request that multiple cdev major numbers be reserved just for these Leitch drivers since the cards are not widely available (two of the three will not be sold outside of this system at all). What I'd like to recommend is that several additional major numbers be reserved for local use. For example having eight reserved major numbers for use within any one organization should be sufficient for any current organizations and yet should not impact the size of the cdev/bdev switch tables very much. What do you think? Is there a better solution? -- Dave Chapeskie Leitch Technology International Inc. Email: dchapes@zeus.leitch.com