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Subject: Re: [PATCH][RFC] Proposal for a new watchdog interface using sysfs
From: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
To: Jakob Oestergaard <jakob@unthought.net>
Cc: Rusty Lynch <rusty@linux.co.intel.com>, Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>,
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On Thu, 2003-02-20 at 21:19, Jakob Oestergaard wrote:
> I know that there is ioctl support in the existing drivers - but I have
> not yet seen a driver which needed it.   "needed" in the sense that
> equivalent functionality could not have been created using dev files
> alone.
> 
> Also, the amount of userspace which will break because of missing ioctl
> functionality will be absolutely *minimal*.  There's not a lot of
> watchdog software out there, and porting whatever software uses ioctls
> to use sane interfaces instead, should be doable.  I don't think anyone
> would get terribly upset if this change was made as a 2.4->2.6
> transition thing.

There is a lot of watchdog using stuff, some quite proprietary and 
embedded into big apps. Even then you have to solve the persistence
issue.

Losing the old api is a 2.8/3.0 thing perhaps, even then its a big
break by Linux standards

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