Re: [PATCH 00/11] RFC: KBUS messaging subsystem

Tony Ibbs
2011-08-03T20:23:27Z

On 17 May 2011, at 09:50, Florian Fainelli wrote:

> Sorry for this late answer.

And apologies for my own late response. I'll try to keep this short as
I hope the "Restatement" side-thread will address some of it.

> On Tuesday 22 March 2011 20:36:40 Jonathan Corbet wrote:
>>
>> - Why kbus over, say, a user-space daemon and unix-domain sockets? I'm
>> not sure I see the advantage that comes with putting this into kernel
>> space.
>
> I also fail to see why this would be required. In my opininon you are trading
> the reliability over complexity by putting this in the kernel.

I hope that's addressed in the "So why did we write it as a kernel
module?" section of the "Restatement" message thread. Basically,
I believe a kernel module is smaller and "steals" reliability from
code written and tested by others. That doesn't mean it's a good
solution "in the wild", of course (privately we can add whatever we
want to the kernel, but in public it is and must be controlled).

> Indeed, I would also suggest having a look at what generic netlink already
> provides like messages per application PID, multicasting and marshaling. If
> you intend to keep a part of it in the kernel, you should have a look at this,
> because from my experience with generic netlink, most of the hard job you are
> re-doing here, has already been done in a generic manner.

If we do end up heading that way, I hope you won't mind if I ask
you for advice!

All the best,
Tibs