Commits
Linus Walleij committed 49db08c3588
chrdev: emit a warning when we go below dynamic major range Currently a dynamically allocated character device major is taken from 254 and downward. This mechanism is used for RTC, IIO and a few other subsystems. The kernel currently has no check prevening these dynamic allocations from eating into the assigned numbers at 233 and downward. In a recent test it was reported that so many dynamic device majors were used on a test server, that the major number for infiniband (231) was stolen. This occurred when allocating a new major number for GPIO chips. The error messages from the kernel were not helpful. (See: https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/2/14/124) This patch adds a defined lower limit of the dynamic major allocation region will henceforth emit a warning if we start to eat into the assigned numbers. It does not do any semantic changes and will not change the kernels behaviour: numbers will still continue to be stolen, but we will know from dmesg what is going on. This also updates the Documentation/devices.txt to clearly reflect that we are using this range of major numbers for dynamic allocation. Reported-by: Ying Huang <ying.huang@linux.intel.com> Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> Cc: Alan Cox <alan@linux.intel.com> Cc: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de> Signed-off-by: Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>