From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Tue, 22 May 2001 21:17:18 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Tue, 22 May 2001 21:17:08 -0400 Received: from saturn.cs.uml.edu ([129.63.8.2]:10509 "EHLO saturn.cs.uml.edu") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Tue, 22 May 2001 21:16:58 -0400 From: "Albert D. Cahalan" Message-Id: <200105230115.f4N1Flb164635@saturn.cs.uml.edu> Subject: Re: [RFD w/info-PATCH] device arguments from lookup, partion code To: torvalds@transmeta.com (Linus Torvalds) Date: Tue, 22 May 2001 21:15:46 -0400 (EDT) Cc: mingo@elte.hu (Ingo Molnar), viro@math.psu.edu (Alexander Viro), rmk@arm.linux.org.uk (Russell King), rgooch@ras.ucalgary.ca (Richard Gooch), matthew@wil.cx (Matthew Wilcox), alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk (Alan Cox), clausen@gnu.org (Andrew Clausen), bcrl@redhat.com (Ben LaHaise), linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org In-Reply-To: from "Linus Torvalds" at May 20, 2001 08:12:04 PM X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL2] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Linus Torvalds writes: > The problem is that if you expect to get nice code, you have to have nice > interfaces and infratructure. And ioctl's aren't it. ... > But that absolutely _requires_ that the driver writers should never see > the silly "pass a random number and a random argument type" kind of > interface with no structure or infrastructure in place. > > Because right now even _good_ programmers make a mess of the fact that > they get passed a bad interface. > > Think of it this way: the user interface to opening a file is > "open()" with pathnames and magic flags. But a filesystem never even > _sees_ that interface, it sees a very nicely structured setup where all > the argument parsing and locking has already been done for it, and the > magic flags don't even exist any more as far as the low-level FS is > concerned. Which is why filesystems _can_ be clean. > > In contrast, ioctl's are passed through directly, with no help to make > them clean. You want a well-defined interface, allowing over-network use? Well, here you go, the CORBA ORB patch for Linux 2.4 kernels: http://korbit.sourceforge.net/ Do you want that against 2.4.5-pre5 or what? Plain ASCII email? :-) The really sick thing is that I could actually use this too. It handles the DSP problem well.