On Tue, 2002-11-19 at 23:02, Greg Herlein wrote: > > > why do people hate IOCTLs ? > > Different people hate them for different reasons. There is a lot to hate :) > > Question: the Linux Telephony API heavily uses ioctls to control > the low level telephone behavior via the driver. Existing > drivers for PCI/ISA/PCMCIA all use this interface. > > I am working on a USB driver that links to the phone subsystem > (by registering via phonedev.o) and uses minor numbers from there > (major number 100). > > Are you guys gonna freak and hate my driver because it uses > ioctls?
ioctl is mostly a good thing. The people who hate it fail to understand that read/write don't have a clear query/response behaviour, nor that a way to do random weird things without cluttering up the kernel is neccessary. ioctl's problems come with getting parsing right (no different from read/write setups) and from knowing how to pass it over a network, encode/decode for 32bit on 64bit setups etc. Thats a real problem and one Linux probably can't solve for historic reasons. Telephony already uses the proper api that gets ioctl length encoding right at least. ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by: To learn the basics of securing your web site with SSL, click here to get a FREE TRIAL of a Thawte Server Certificate: http://www.gothawte.com/rd524.html _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe, use the last form field at: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linux-usb-devel
