Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:22:24 -0700
From: Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com>
To: ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman)
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
       Jamie Lokier <jamie@shareable.org>, Evgeniy Polyakov <zbr@ioremap.net>,
       Eric Paris <eparis@redhat.com>, David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org,
       netdev@vger.kernel.org, viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk, alan@linux.intel.com,
       hch@infradead.org
Subject: Re: fanotify as syscalls
Message-Id: <20090921172224.e33f5b08.randy.dunlap@oracle.com>
In-Reply-To: <m1r5tzq1gf.fsf@fess.ebiederm.org>
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On Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:15:28 -0700 Eric W. Biederman wrote:

> Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:
> 
> > Quite frankly, I have _never_ever_ seen a good reason for talking to the 
> > kernel with some idiotic packet interface. It's just a fancy way to do 
> > ioctl's, and everybody knows that ioctl's are bad and evil. Why are fancy 
> > packet interfaces suddenly much better?
> 
> For working with the networking stack there are a lot of advantages because
> netlink is the interface to everything in the network stack.
> 
> There are nice things like the packet to create a new interface is the same
> packet the kernel sends everyone to report a new interface etc.
> 
> netlink also seems to get the structured data thing right.  You can
> parse the packet even if you don't understand everything.  Each tag is
> well defined like a syscall, taking exactly one kind of argument.
> Which avoids the worst failure of ioctl in that you can't even parse
> everything, and the argument may be a linked list in the calling
> process or something else atrocious.
> 
> All of that said syscalls are good, and I would not recommend netlink
> to anything not in the network stack.

like CONFIG_SCSI_NETLINK and CONFIG_QUOTA_NETLINK_INTERFACE  :(


---
~Randy
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