Re: [Fwd: Re: connector is missing in 2.6.12-rc2-mm1]

[Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org>]

On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 13:52 +0400, Evgeniy Polyakov wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 10:12 +0100, Ian Campbell wrote:
> > On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 12:13 +0400, Evgeniy Polyakov wrote:
> > > The main idea was to simplify userspace control and notification
> > > system - so people did not waste it's time learning how skb's are
> > > allocated
> > > and processed, how socket layer is designed and what all those
> > > netlink_* and NLMSG* mean if they do not need it.
> > 
> > Isn't connector built on top of netlink? If so, is there any reason for
> > it to be a new subsystem rather than an extension the the netlink API?
> 
> Connector is not netlink API extension in any way.
> It uses netlink as transport layer, one can change
> cn_netlink_send()/cn_input() 
> into something like bidirectional ioctl and use it.
> 
> Only one cn_netlink_send() function can be "described" as API
> extension, 
> although even it is not entirely true.

I see much overlap here too. Wouldn't it be nice to see the transport
part of the connector code to be implemented as a generic netlink
multicast? We already have uni- and broadcast for netlink.

Isn't the whole purpose of the connector to hook in notifications that
act only if someone is listening? That is a perfect multicast case. :)

At the time we added kobject_uevent I was missing something like this.
The broadcast groups did not really fit, and we decided not to use them,
and unicast wasn't a option here.

Thanks,
Kay