Re: [PATCH 1/4] sas: add flag for locally attached PHYs

Arjan van de Ven
2005-10-20T17:22:50Z

> We are not going to implement SDI in the kernel. Long before SDI or
> it's predecessor, HP CSMI were designed we made it clear we're not going
> to accept wide ioctl-APIs, especially when they're even bad for old
> ioctl API standards. The CSMI spec has been passed around in an early
> phase and been totally rejected,

Just to say AYE on this:

the problem with these things is that they define an IOCTL interface,
while a library level interface would have been a LOT better. By far.
That way the spec doesn't define the implementation, but only a real
INTERFACE while allowing flexibility and compatibility. IOCTLs are just
very very much the wrong layer to put such an interface. (just as
posix/sus specify the (g)libc interface and not the kernel interface,
although of course they impact it somewhat and glibc can for several
things do a straight pass-through to the raw kernel interface).