Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > Quite frankly, I have _never_ever_ seen a good reason for talking to the > kernel with some idiotic packet interface. It's just a fancy way to do > ioctl's, and everybody knows that ioctl's are bad and evil. Why are fancy > packet interfaces suddenly much better? For working with the networking stack there are a lot of advantages because netlink is the interface to everything in the network stack. There are nice things like the packet to create a new interface is the same packet the kernel sends everyone to report a new interface etc. netlink also seems to get the structured data thing right. You can parse the packet even if you don't understand everything. Each tag is well defined like a syscall, taking exactly one kind of argument. Which avoids the worst failure of ioctl in that you can't even parse everything, and the argument may be a linked list in the calling process or something else atrocious. All of that said syscalls are good, and I would not recommend netlink to anything not in the network stack. Eric -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
