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

[bjorn at sccs.swarthmore.edu (Bjorn Dittmer-Roche)]

On Sun, 7 Mar 2004, Danny Cox wrote:

> 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.


Isn't performance a problem with all those IDE drives?

	bjorn