I have already asked this question on the kernelnewbies IRC but I wanted a bit of feedback from the Linux gurus ...
Is sysfs 'supposed' to be a read only where various kernel parameters are exposed to be read ? Or are they 'supposed' to be writable too ? Are all drivers in future required to expose interfaces in sysfs ? If the answer to the above is true , then would we be really requiring IOCTL calls at all anymore ... because all that we would need to do to make a driver do something is to change values in some of the files in sysfs ... for eg to call a ioctl called DO_SOMETHING on driver D1 we would be doing : echo 1> /sysfs/D1/IOCTLS/DO_SOMETHING ( or something like that ... :) ) Are there any plans of exposing the kernel api ( that is syscalls and libc ) as sysfs files ... for eg echo 1> /sysfs/libc/get_system_time cat /sysfs/libc/results/system_time Would it be a good idea to do this ? How about exposing core system calls , libc and any new libraries over http/over the network ? This would make calling ioctls and really low level stuff from high level languages like Java a trivial process . For eg right now if I wanted to call some function say foo () in library my_library.so in Java I would have to take the JNI/JNA route ... doable but not exactly 'easy' ( same for other high level languages ) ... whereas in the new way all I would have to do is send a request to say :- http://localhost:7000/my_library/foo?arg1=something,arg2=something ( Just wanted a frank discussion on this idea .... ) Thanking you in anticipation , Yours sincerely , Kernel newbie -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/