On Mon, 12 Nov 2001, Andreas Gruenbacher wrote:
> There is one difference between the interfaces you are complaining about
> above and the proposed EA interface for EA's: In those interfaces you have
> wildcard parameters that are used for who-knows-what, depending on a
> command-like parameter, including use as a value, use as a pointer to a
> value/struct, etc.
Yes, and? You've got more than enough material for the same kind of
abuse. What's more, you _already_ have it - in some of the subfunctions
*data is read from, in some - written to, in some - ignored. Worse
yet, in some subfunctions we put structured data in there, in some -
just a chunk of something.
With all that, who had said that a year down the road we won't get a
dozen of new syscalls hiding behind that one?
Sorry, folks, but idea of private extendable syscall table (per-filesystem,
no less) doesn't look like a good thing. That's _the_ reason why ioctl()
is bad.