Re: PIDs limited to 15 significant bits

From: Albert D. Cahalan (acahalan@cs.uml.edu)
Date: Sun Oct 01 2000 - 22:48:41 EDT

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    David Weinehall writes:
    > On Sun, Oct 01, 2000 at 01:10:50AM -0400, Albert D. Cahalan wrote:
    >> Andries Brouwer writes:
    >>> On Fri, Sep 29, 2000 at 03:57:10PM -0400, Albert D. Cahalan wrote:

    >>>> What do you think of "ps -efj" on a standard 80x24 screen?
    >>>
    >>> I never give such commands, but just tried:
    >>>
    >>> aeb 119876 1 426 236 0 23:32 tty1 00:00:00 xterm
    >>> aeb 119877 119876 119877 119877 0 23:32 pts/9 00:00:00 -bash
    >>> aeb 119884 119877 119884 119877 0 23:33 pts/9 00:00:00 ps -efj
    >>>
    >>> as you see, the ps program here fails to align the columns,
    >>> but otherwise all is well.
    >>
    >> How are you going to like the output after some more uptime?
    >> The record is around 1200 days I think. With a faster machine
    >> doing a lot of work, you could just about lose the CMD column.
    >
    > So, let's see if I get this straight: you want us to limit PID's to
    > 15 bits rather than 31 bits because the output of ps wouldn't look nice
    > otherwise?! PLEASE...

    This reason is as good as any. Remember, nobody has yet
    actually run out of PID space. When that happens, then
    there is a legitimate need to increase PID space.

    I see you don't remember the original post. It argued in
    favor of a large PID space "because the output of ps wouldn't
    look nice otherwise"!!! (the poster wanted output sorted by
    start time without using --sort=start to ask for it)

    > Should we stick to 16 bit UID's because a simple
    > "ls -nal" might look ugly?! Oh, and du/df will probably start to look
    > ugly when having those 2 TB sized LV's. Oh my... Better return to non
    > LFS.

    If one really NEEDS large numbers, then the limit must go.
    I really don't want to see "ls -nal" spit out 10-digit numbers
    unless I really have a billion users.
    -
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