Re: [RFC][PATCH -mm take5 6/7] add ioctls for adding/removing target

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Hello Satyam,

*ugh*. I was wondering what a show-stopper this particular patch
was -- introduces a couple of ioctl()'s, exports a new structure to
userspace, adds a hitherto-unneeded header file, brings in
tty_struct/tty_operations and ends up adding so much complexity/
bloat to netconsole.c. Not only that, it must live together (and
side-by-side) with the sysfs interface also, because the two of them
do different things: sysfs to be able to modify target parameters at
run-time and the ioctl()'s to dynamically add/remove targets. We
can't really mkdir(2) or rmdir(2) in sysfs so the ioctl()'s are needed.

So may I suggest:

Just lose *both* the sysfs and ioctl() interfaces and use _configfs_.
It is *precisely* the thing you need in your driver here -- the ability
to create / destroy kernel objects (or config_items in configfs lingo)
from _userspace_ via simple mkdir(2) and rmdir(2). And configfs
makes changing multiple configurable parameters atomically trivial
too, via rename(2) ... not to mention a sysfs+ioctls -> configfs
conversion would help your patchset lose some weight too :-)

Stephen Hemminger previously advised me about the user interface such as the following messages.

Some other speculations:
1. Would it be possible to add ioctl's to /dev/console? This would be more in
    keeping with older Unix style model.

2. Using sysfs makes sense if there is a device object that exists to
   add the sysfs attributes to.

3. Procfs is handy for summary type tables.

4. Netlink does feel like overkill for this. Although newer generic netlink
   makes it easier.

So, I implemented ioctls to add/remove port like this patch on the tty driver.
But I'm going to search configfs. Thank you for you information.

Thanks
--
Keiichi KII
NEC Corporation OSS Platform Development Division
E-mail: [email protected]

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