[Drbd-dev] Re: [john.cagle@hp.com: FW: device number request for drbd]

[Lars Marowsky-Bree]

On 2004-07-30T14:14:01,
   Lars Ellenberg <Lars.Ellenberg@linbit.com> said:

> > You could even use the supplied init script and put
> > ADD_MOD_PARAM="major_nr=43" into /etc/default/drbd
> 
> patch will follow soon which will replace that with
> "use_nbd_major"

BTW, in real life our maintenance crew has rejected this. I will have to
patch the module to default to the old major by default. Upgrading the
kernel must work w/o updating the user-space at the same time, I'm
afraid.

We are in maintenance only mode already, so it's a matter of policy; we
only do bugfixes and security changes right now.

I can probably re-align with the first service-pack in March or so,
where we can "force" the customers to swallow a bigger chunk of packages
as a single bite.

Changing such fundamental behaviour in a stable series really is not
very good. You are breaking the kernel/user-space boundary. Nobody cares
what you do _in_ the kernel, or _within_ user-space, but this really
ain't good. Common policy for stable series (also adhered to by most
other projects) is _never_ to change the default.

I'll need to check whether that works, or whether the ioctls etc also
break, which would be very bad. That's just not a thing to do within a
stable series, but maybe we have different concepts of "stable" ;)


Sincerely,
    Lars Marowsky-Brée <lmb@suse.de>

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