Subject: Re: RFC: ipath ioctls and their replacements
From: "Bryan O'Sullivan" <bos@pathscale.com>
To: Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>, Roland Dreier <rdreier@cisco.com>,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, openib-general@openib.org
In-Reply-To: <20060119053940.GB21467@kroah.com>
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Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2006 21:53:08 -0800
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On Wed, 2006-01-18 at 21:39 -0800, Greg KH wrote:

> Ok, that's fair enough.  But if you want to do something like ptys, then
> why not just have your own filesystem for this driver?

If you think it's appropriate to implement a new filesystem to replace a
single ioctl that returns two integers, we can probably do that, but
more realistically, the GETPORT ioctl can probably live a long and
untroubled life as another netlink message.

> You are just making your own type of special interface up as you
> go, so the complexity is also there (this complexity would normally be
> in some core code, which I am hoping that your code will turn into for
> other devices of the same type, right?)

The most important chunk of likely common code I can see at the moment
is the stuff for bodging user page mappings that we got hammered over
already.  The drivers/infiniband/ tree already has code that does
something like this, and a few other not-yet-in-tree network drivers
that support RDMA have similar needs, too.

	<b

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