Re: fanotify as syscalls

Randy Dunlap
2009-09-22T00:23:10Z

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 :(

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~Randy