Re: [RFD w/info-PATCH] device arguments from lookup, partion code

From: Richard Gooch (rgooch@ras.ucalgary.ca)
Date: Sat May 19 2001 - 22:22:55 EDT

  • Next message: Alexander Viro: "Re: [RFD w/info-PATCH] device arguments from lookup, partion code"

    Matthew Wilcox writes:
    > On Sat, May 19, 2001 at 12:51:23PM -0600, Richard Gooch wrote:
    > > Al, if you really want to kill ioctl(2), then perhaps you should
    > > implement a transaction(2) syscall. Something like:
    > > int transaction (int fd, void *rbuf, size_t rlen,
    > > void *wbuf, size_t wlen);
    > >
    > > Of course, there wouldn't be any practical gain, since we already have
    > > ioctl(2). Any gain would be aesthetic.
    >
    > I can tell you haven't had to write any 32-bit ioctl emulation code for
    > a 64-bit kernel recently.

    The transaction(2) syscall can be just as easily abused as ioctl(2) in
    this respect. People can pass pointers to ill-designed structures very
    easily. The main advantage of transaction(2) is that hopefully, people
    will not be so bone-headed as to forget to pass sizeof *structptr
    as the size field. So perhaps some error trapping is possible.

                                    Regards,

                                            Richard....
    Permanent: rgooch@atnf.csiro.au
    Current: rgooch@ras.ucalgary.ca
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