Re: [RFC][PATCH -mm take5 6/7] add ioctls for adding/removing target

From: Keiichi KII
Date: Thu Jun 21 2007 - 05:25:21 EST


Hello Satyam,

Hmm, I might've missed this thread, but my opinion on the
alternatives, fwiw:

1. I think adding new ioctl's to the kernel are generally disliked for
obvious reasons. Perhaps Stephen meant to add some generic
ioctl's above (and not separate ones specially implemented for
the dynamically reconfigurable netconsole driver)?

You're right.
At first, I implemented ioctls to misc device because of using misc sysfs.
But, Andrew Morton said "Using an ioctl() against a miscdev is rather untypical for networking.". So, I implemented ioclts to tty_driver.

Please do consider configfs. Note that we'll have to lose the sysfs
symlink from your target's kobject to the kobject of the ethernet
device if we switch to configfs, but was that symlink needed for
some essential functionality or was it simply for informational
purpose? IMHO, this patchset only needs to bring in functionality
to be able to create, destroy, and modify netconsole targets at
run-time, and all these reconfiguration tasks would be handled
quite well by configfs, AFAICT.

It was for informational pupose. But, if we used symlink to the net_device kobject in sysfs, we could easily keep up with changing network device name by changing symbolic link.
In the case of configfs, Do we use config_item related to the network interface because the configfs doesn't have symlink that refers to net_device kobject
(e.g. "network_interface" in configfs, "network_interface" value is "eth0")?

I'm going to search configfs and modify interface to configfs.

Thanks
--
Keiichi KII
NEC Corporation OSS Platform Development Division
E-mail: k-keiichi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

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