On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 06:05:58PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote: > On Mon, 27 Sep 2010 10:56:09 -0500 (CDT) > Christoph Lameter <cl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > > On Fri, 24 Sep 2010, Alan Cox wrote: > > > > > Whether you add new syscalls or do the fd passing using flags and hide > > > the ugly bits in glibc is another question. > > > > Use device specific ioctls instead of syscalls? > > Some of the ioctls are probably not device specific, the job of the OS in > part is to present a unified interface. We already have a mess of HPET > and RTC driver ioctls. Yes, and the whole point of introducing a PTP hardare clock API was to avoid each new clock driver introducing yet another ioctl interface. I had proposed a standard ioctl interface for PTP hardware clocks, but that interface was rightly criticized for duplicating the posix clock API. It does not make sense to have multiple interfaces with the exact same functionality. It is impossible to support every last feature of every possible hardware clock with a generic interface, so there will always need to be special ioctls for such features. However, some clock functions *are* completely generic and apply to every clock: - set time - get time - adjust the frequency by N ppb - shift the time by a given offset The first two are provided by the posix clock interface, the third by the NTP adjtimex call, which also can support (by a single mode extension) the last item. Richard -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-api" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
