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Message-ID: References: <87ecdqewg2.ffs@fw13> Precedence: bulk X-Mailing-List: linux-api@vger.kernel.org List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Hello, Alejandro Colomar wrote on Sun, Oct 18, 2026 at 01:25:17PM +0200: > From: Thomas Gleixner >> So in pratice these syscalls and IOCTLs are ancient ballast and any >> modern distro should not need them anymore. Same in OpenBSD; by default, securelevel(7) and sysctl(2) block access to them. The most important place where they are still occasionally used are some very old X11 video drivers that that do not use kernel mode setting but instead use libpciaccess to access PCI devices directly. It appears they are also used by some coreboot-utils programs, but we did not investigate what exactly the purpose is there. No other use case came up when i asked around among developers. > Thanks! I'll keep the manual pages unchanged. An improvement resulted in OpenBSD manual pages though: https://man.openbsd.org/?query=iopl&apropos=1 # two related pages https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=179214240879202 # commit message In general, i believe it is valuable when people adhere to standards and take care to write portable code. However, this does not apply to the present case of low-level hardware control where operations are unavoidably highly system- and hardware-dependent. Getting rid of these functions may or may not ultimately become a goal in OpenBSD, but it appears developers working in the area currently see no urgency. There is very little risk because these finctions have been disabled by default for quite some time now. Yours, Ingo