On Wed, Feb 02, 2022 at 12:36:12PM -0800, Bart Van Assche wrote: > On 1/31/22 17:33, Luis Chamberlain wrote: > > It would seem we keep tacking on things with ioctls for the block > > layer and filesystems. Even for new trendy things like io_uring [0]. > > For a few years I have found this odd, and have slowly started > > asking folks why we don't consider alternatives like a generic > > netlink family. I've at least been told that this is desirable > > but no one has worked on it. *If* we do want this I think we just > > not only need to commit to do this, but also provide a target. LSFMM > > seems like a good place to do this. > > Do we need a new netlink family for this purpose? The RDMA subsystem uses > netlink since considerable time for configuration purposes instead of > ioctls, sysfs or configfs. The user space tool 'rdma' supports that > interface. That tool is used by e.g. blktests to configure the soft-RoCE and > soft-iWARP interfaces. > > See also rdma(8), available at e.g. > https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/rdma.8.html. RDMA is netork'ish though. But my point is not just to consider generic netlink, it's just an example. I'm just flabbergasted we're still adding ioctls for new random filesystem or block features. Luis
