----- "Bob Montgomery" <bob.montgomery(a)hp.com> wrote:
On Mon, 2009-06-08 at 19:50 +0000, Dave Anderson wrote:
Regarding blkext 259
>
> Correction -- it does appear in the major_names[] array, in a
2.6.30
> kernel for example, like this:
>
> crash> p * major_names[4]
> $51 = {
> next = 0x0,
> major = 259,
> name = "blkext\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000"
> }
>
> where it appears to be the only major_names[] entry whose "major"
value
> doesn't equal the index into the array (i.e., 259 != 4). But the
> bdev_map.probes[4] entry is unused.
The blkext is supposed to get used as soon as someone wants to put more
than 15 partitions on an sd disk. (Explanation at
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/701825)
Then the upper partitions will appear as minors of 259. When that
starts happening more, having a way to see it might (*might*) be
interesting.
> > At this point I'm about ready to deprecate the whole command...
;-)
And at this point I couldn't really argue much :-) I obviously hadn't
used the command for a while. I was casting around, hoping it would
maybe help me find the diskstats stuff for the block devices. I was
trying to answer a question like "How much disk activity was going on
before this crashed?"
When I tried the dev command and it bombed at the chrdev stuff before
getting to the blkdev stuff, I was motivated to get it going enough to
see if it would help answer my question, but it doesn't print anything
(like hd_struct pointers) that could help me with my problem. But I
figured someone had once wanted that device info, so it might as well
work...
OK, I understand...
But anyway, given the command's current capability, do you think that the
alternative -f option should just be thrown out, and that all devices
should be dumped regardless whether they have file_operations associated
with them or not?
Dave