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

[Greg]

Here is the answer to that from a kind soul on the Debian User List.  Also,
when you look at the MAKEDEV file, you can see the limitation.  This answer
worked for my to create a hdo and hdm drive.  Moving IDE cable so that you
don't skip a slot on an controller card also helps.

#####  start of post that helped me  ####

>
> No, don't do that! There is no such limit (/dev is basically just an
> ordinary directory full of device nodes - there's nothing particularly
> magic in the kernel for it, unless you're using something like devfs or
> udev, which still doesn't have such a limit), and it'll be a pain
> restoring the device nodes you've deleted.
>
> This isn't a kernel problem at all. You just need to upgrade makedev so
> that it knows how to create that device node properly; the version in
> woody doesn't. Alternatively, do it by hand (laborious, but should
> work):
>
>   mknod -m 0660 /dev/hdm b 88 0
>   chown root:disk /dev/hdm
>   for x in `seq 1 20`; do
>     mknod -m 0660 /dev/hdm"$x" b 88 "$x"
>     chown root:disk /dev/hdm"$x"
>   done
>
> Likewise for hdo, but substitute 89 for 88.
>
> Cheers,
>
> --
> Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson at flatline.org.uk]
>
>

#####  end of post that helped me  ####
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org]On Behalf Of Danny
> Cox
> Sent: Sunday, March 07, 2004 2:35 PM
> To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
> Subject: Re: [ale] Request for info on mknod -- or How I ran out of
> devicenames
>
>
> 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
>
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