[openib-general] Re: RFC: ipath ioctls and their replacements

[David S. Miller]

From: Bryan O'Sullivan <bos at pathscale.com>
Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2006 17:14:16 -0800

> That looks doable, but to my eyes, the netlink interface looks both
> more cumbersome and less reliable than ioctl.  At least it
> apparently lets us do arbitrarily peculiar things :-)

It's going to give you strict typing, and extensible attributes for
the configuration attributes you define.  So if you determine later
"oh we need to add this knob for changing X" you can do that without
breaking the existing interface.  With ioctl() that is usually
impossible or unreasonably hard to accomplish.

Try not to get discouraged, give it a shot :)