Re: CSMI questions
From: Greg KH
Date: Tue Feb 22 2005 - 18:23:32 EST
On Tue, Feb 22, 2005 at 11:16:56AM -0600, mikem wrote:
> All,
> I hate to dredge this up again, but, when Eric Moore submitted changes for MPT
> Fusion driver containing the CSMI ioctls it was rejected. There was talk on
> the linux-scsi list about it being a horrible interface, among other things.
> There were also comments about there being a Linux only approach. Personally,
> I like that idea but it's not good from a business perspective. Especially
> because HP, Dell, and others support more than one OS. Having a unique set of
> management apps for each OS would be very cumbersome.
Honestly, the kernel developers don't care about cross-OS platform
management utilities from a business perspective. :)
> We've also been looking at how to use sysfs rather than ioctls.
Good.
> Some look reasonable, others seem to be restricted by sysfs itself.
> 1. only ASCII files are allowed
With 1 value in that file.
> 2. if multiple attributes are contained in one file, who parses out the data?
multiple attributes are not allowed to be contained in a single file.
> 3. one buffer of size (PAGE_SIZE) may not hold all of the data required
You have a _single_ attribute that is bigger than PAGE_SIZE? What is
it?
> I'd also like an (brief) explanation of why ioctls are so bad. I've seen the
> reasons of them never going away, etc. But from the beginning of time (UNIX)
> ioctls have been the preferred method of user space/kernel communication.
That's because there was no other method. See the lkml archives for why
ioctls are considered bad, I don't want to dredge it up again.
Hope this helps,
greg k-h
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