From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261680AbULFWUu (ORCPT ); Mon, 6 Dec 2004 17:20:50 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261681AbULFWUu (ORCPT ); Mon, 6 Dec 2004 17:20:50 -0500 Received: from 209-128-68-124.BAYAREA.NET ([209.128.68.124]:51393 "EHLO terminus.zytor.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261680AbULFWUm (ORCPT ); Mon, 6 Dec 2004 17:20:42 -0500 Message-ID: <41B4DB1C.3060406@zytor.com> Date: Mon, 06 Dec 2004 14:20:12 -0800 From: "H. Peter Anvin" User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.8 (X11/20041020) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Steven Rostedt CC: LKML Subject: Re: [RFC] dynamic syscalls revisited References: <1101741118.25841.40.camel@localhost.localdomain> <20041129151741.GA5514@infradead.org> <1102370517.25841.216.camel@localhost.localdomain> In-Reply-To: <1102370517.25841.216.camel@localhost.localdomain> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Steven Rostedt wrote: > > I disagree about this statement. ioctl's suck because they usually have > none, or very poor documentation and you are stuck with opening devices, > and sending parameters to them that may be for the wrong device and > there is really no good checking to see what you sent is what you want > since its all defined by human unreadable numbers. > That's like saying you might be calling the wrong syscall by accident. > As for dynamic system calls (and especially the way I've implemented > them) you have human readable names, with varying amount of parameters > that can make sense. So even if you still have none to very poor > documentation, you can understand things perhaps a little better. There > is also much better checking in dynamic system calls than to ioctls. There is NO checking in the syscall interface. Period. Any such checking is a facility of some kind of stub generator, and that's independent of the method used to invoke it. -hpa