[ale] Request for info on mknod -- or How I ran out of device names

[Danny Cox]

Greg,

On Sat, 2004-03-06 at 18:03, Greg wrote:
> I am trying to create 2 device files for my fileserver. It has 3 Maxtor IDE
> controller cards in it and the dmesg tells me that the 2 drives that I am
> trying to use are called hdo and hdm - however they are not in /dev.  I
> tried MAKEDEV hdo and MAKEDEV hdm, but it only goes to hdk or so. This is
> true also on my Debian Woody Sparc64 box.  Someone on the Libranet list said
> that they can do a MAKEDEV hdo just fine, but I cannot.  I have Googled and
> know that I need a major and minor number for hard drives - is there a way
> to find this information on Libranet Debian 2.8.1 or on Linux in general ?
> I really need to use those 2 hard drives, but it looks like I have ran out
> of device names.
> 
> Of course, if mknod is the wrong approach I would like to know what the
> right one is also ...

	That's exactly the problem we ran into at Qunatum building a 12 (IDE)
drive system (but only using the master side of each chipset).  That hit
(hmm, let me see, uh) hdv.  The problem is that due to how they're set
up, the kernel just doesn't recognize more than 10 hwifs (hardware
interfaces), unless you jigger the defines.  See
linux/include/asm-i386/ide.h (MAX_HWIFS) for that, plus you'll have to
jigger (perhaps) linux/drivers/ide/ide.c, function init_hwif_data(),
plus the array ide_hwif_to_major[] to map more drives.

	HTH!

-- 
kernel, n.: A part of an operating system that preserves the
medieval traditions of sorcery and black art.

Danny