Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2005 05:39:57 -0800 (PST) From: "Kamal R. Prasad" <kamalpr@yahoo.com> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Opening and wriiting to file in Kern Message-ID: <20050206133957.79623.qmail@web52703.mail.yahoo.com> In-Reply-To: <20050206124109.GA29361@straylight.m.ringlet.net>
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--- Peter Pentchev <roam@ringlet.net> wrote: > On Sun, Feb 06, 2005 at 04:22:41AM -0800, Kamal R. > Prasad wrote: > > > > --- Scott Long <scottl@freebsd.org> wrote: > > > > > Ashwin Chandra wrote: [snip] > > facility. I don't see anything wrong with > providing a > > stream (like) interface to the filesystem. > > While there might indeed be nothing wrong with it, > besides added > complexity, the traditional way to do it would be to > have a userland > configuration utility that communicates with the > kernel module either > via ioctl's on some standard device, or via ioctl's > or reading/writing > of a driver-specific device. This has the advantage > of being a bit more > portable - while different OS's implement disk/file > I/O within the > kernel in wildly different ways, all OS's provide > relatively simple ways > for a kernel module to define a new device and > handle ioctl's to it, and > all OS's provide basically the same > userland-to-kernel interface for > having a program open a device and issue ioctl's to > it :) > No doubt about the portability aspect. But there are situations wherein the kernel does *NOT* want userland to know that it is using the filesystem for providing some functionaality. For a device, it is indeed typical for a userland program to accompany the driver. But besides that, there are definately situations (1 of which I am dealing with) wherein there is no userland code to help one out. [snip] regards -kamal __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 250MB free storage. Do more. Manage less. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250
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