Takashi Iwai wrote:
Wu Fengguang wrote:
Jaroslav Kysela wrote:
I don't agree to have only 4 slots for soundcards in the static minor numbering. Maybe the driver should be converted to use subdevices or we might drop the static minor number allocation at all (it might have only impact for old distros).
Jaroslav, will there be so many sound cards in one system?
In the old time, yes. Now we have less and less PCI slots. In theory, we may have lots of USB audio devices, though :)
I implemented CONFIG_SND_DYNAMIC_MINORS because people had been asking for more than eight cards. (And by now I have lots of cards too, although my computer probably isn't very typical.)
Anyway, static numbering is needed only for systems without udev/devfs, and there we shouldn't change it for backwards compatibility. The HDA driver already requires kernels >= 2.6, so I don't see a problem with requiring CONFIG_SND_DYNAMIC_MINORS to get all HDMI outputs.
Another possible solution would be to change the minor number assignment to a really dynamic one. So far, due to legacy /dev/aload and co, we have some static restriction per card basis.
What restriction would that be? With CONFIG_SND_DYNAMIC_MINORS, we don't allocate minors that would be used by /dev/aload*, but there are no restrictions on the number of cards or devices.