Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 22 Feb 2005 15:14:50 -0800 | From | Greg KH <> | Subject | Re: CSMI questions |
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On Tue, Feb 22, 2005 at 11:16:56AM -0600, mikem wrote: > All, > I hate to dredge this up again, but, when Eric Moore submitted changes for MPT > Fusion driver containing the CSMI ioctls it was rejected. There was talk on > the linux-scsi list about it being a horrible interface, among other things. > There were also comments about there being a Linux only approach. Personally, > I like that idea but it's not good from a business perspective. Especially > because HP, Dell, and others support more than one OS. Having a unique set of > management apps for each OS would be very cumbersome.
Honestly, the kernel developers don't care about cross-OS platform management utilities from a business perspective. :)
> We've also been looking at how to use sysfs rather than ioctls.
Good.
> Some look reasonable, others seem to be restricted by sysfs itself. > 1. only ASCII files are allowed
With 1 value in that file.
> 2. if multiple attributes are contained in one file, who parses out the data?
multiple attributes are not allowed to be contained in a single file.
> 3. one buffer of size (PAGE_SIZE) may not hold all of the data required
You have a _single_ attribute that is bigger than PAGE_SIZE? What is it?
> I'd also like an (brief) explanation of why ioctls are so bad. I've seen the > reasons of them never going away, etc. But from the beginning of time (UNIX) > ioctls have been the preferred method of user space/kernel communication.
That's because there was no other method. See the lkml archives for why ioctls are considered bad, I don't want to dredge it up again.
Hope this helps,
greg k-h - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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