Hi everybody, I'd like to offer my $0.02 to the ongoing discussion. IIRC we already have some OOB-data channels - ioctl, setsockopt, fcntl ... to name only a few. But: we already have a side-band: send with MSG_OOB! And, as I just saw in the sources, there are some flags free. So how about defining more than 1 OOB-channel and using them instead of ioctl and so on? There could be some bits reserved for the channel - 0 for normal, 1 for alternate date (MSG_OOB), and eg. -1 for SOL_RAW, -2 for SOL_TCP, -3 for SOL_IP, ... and so on. For files there would be 1 layer giving locking functionality. So, a syscall is already there - we could use this. For compatibility this change could be undone in libc. Please don't flame if I didn't see something obvious - everything else is welcome. Regards, Phil - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/