Hello,
I'm trying to figure out what is the correct way to pass references to
kobjects between userland and kernel space.
I have my big object hierarchy of kobjects representing a TDM interconnect
graph with channels, crossconnectors, physical ports and so on.
The main objects are nodes and archs; archs connect two nodes together.
The hierarchy is exported to sysfs.
>From userland I want to tell the kernel "Connect node X to node Y".
The first problem is deciding what interface to use; currently I'm using an
ioctl() but I'm open to suggestions.
The other issue is how to identify objects X and Y in the ioctl() request,
here are the possible ways I've examined:
1- Path
-------
Every kobject registered in sysfs has its own path. I can use path_lookup()
and lookup the object by its kobj.dentry.
Pros: In userland it's easy to identify kobjects by their path in sysfs. The
path is unambiguous and already available.
Cons: Passing the pathname to the kernel requires a big ioctl() body
(theoretically at least 2*MAX_PATH using a fixed-length structure).
Doing the reverse mapping (from kernel to userspace) is not easy since you
need to know from which vfsmount to generate the path with d_path().
2- Relative path
----------------
Pros: No need to consider where sysfs is mounted and would also work if the
kobjects are not registeres in sysfs.
Cons: There should be specific functions to parse/generate a pathname that is
specific to kobject hierarchy.
3- Unique ID
------------
A unique ID, probably a integer value can be assigned to each object.
Pros: much more compact, do not need parsing
Cons: Needs an 'id' attribute in sysfs for every object and a reverse mapping
(done with symlinks?) to allow an userland application to map IDs to paths
and vice-versa. Unique ID allocation needs an allocator (list, bitmap, etc)
either global or for every namespace.
4- kobject's pointer
------------------
The kobject's pointer could opaquely be seen as a unique identifier.
Pros: Compact, no need for storage.
Cons: Probably insane, exposes kernel internals to the userland, a developer
may be tempted to deference the user-provided value directly :)
So, are there any other ways? If not, which one would be advisable among
these?
Bye,
--
Daniele "Vihai" Orlandi
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