On Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:15:28 -0700 Eric W. Biederman wrote: > 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. like CONFIG_SCSI_NETLINK and CONFIG_QUOTA_NETLINK_INTERFACE :( --- ~Randy -- 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
