Re: no ioctls for serial ports? [was Re: LANANA: To Pending Device Num

Alexander Viro
2001-05-20T13:40:52Z

On 20 May 2001, Kai Henningsen wrote:

> I've seen this question several times in this thread. I haven't seen the
> obvious answer, though.
>
> Have a new system call:
>
> ctlfd = open_device_control_fd(fd);
>
> If fd is something that doesn't have a control interface (say, it already
> is a control filehandle), this returns an appropriate error code.

It may have several. Which one?

FWIW, I think that mixing network and device ioctls is a bad idea. These
groups are very different and we'd be better off dealing with changes in
them separately.

For devices... I'd say that fpath(2) (same type as getcwd(2)) would be
a good way to deal with that. Or fpath(3) - implemented via readlink(2)
on /proc/self/fd/<n>.