statbug.c: Spot a BUG with NFS stat()

[William Roberts]

Your "bug" is complete nonsense. If you can give chapter and
verse for your strange assertion that negative dev_t values are
"garbage", then and only then do you have a bug in your system
rather than a bug in your understanding.

On my system, <sys/types.h> have dev_t as unsigned short
anyway, so no negative numbers there. Since an NFS filestore is
not represented by a local physical device, the dev_t number
isn't required to have a major device number that could be used
as an index into the bdevsw or cdevsw tables.

In fact, most NFS implementations choose to fake a major device
number that is way in excess of the likely valid range to avoid
clashes. It's also a function of the client, because "device
numbers" aren't part of the NFS abstraction.

-- 

William Roberts                 ARPA: liam at cs.qmw.ac.uk
Queen Mary & Westfield College  UUCP: liam at qmw-cs.UUCP
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