Christoph Hellwig writes: > On Sat, Mar 05, 2005 at 07:40:06PM -0500, Robert Love wrote: >> On Sun, 2005-03-06 at 00:04 +0000, Christoph Hellwig wrote: >>> The user interface is still bogus. >> >> I presume you are talking about the ioctl. I have tried to engage you >> and others on what exactly you prefer instead. I have said that moving >> to a write interface is fine but I don't see how ut is _any_ better than >> the ioctl. Write is less typed, in fact, since we lose the command >> versus argument delineation. >> >> But if it is a anonymous decision, I'll switch it. Or take patches. ;-) >> It isn't a big deal. > > See the review I sent. Write is exactly the right interface for that kind > of thing. For comment vs argument either put the number first so we don't > have the problem of finding a delinator that isn't a valid filename, or > use '\0' as such.
That's just putrid. You've proposed an interface that combines the worst of ASCII with the worst of binary. It is now well-established that ASCII interfaces are horribly slow. This one will be no exception... but with the '\0' in there, you have a binary interface. So, it's an evil hybrid. An ioctl() is a syscall with scope restricting it to a single fd. This is a fine user interface, not a bogus one. (keep 32-on-64 operation in mind to be polite) If you'd rather have a normal (global) system call though, that'll do too, likely leading to a bit more type checking in the glibc-provided headers. Adding plain old syscalls is rather nice actually. It's only a pain at first, while waiting for glibc to catch up. - 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/
