Re: ioctl/setsockopt etc. vs read/write - idea

[Ph. Marek]

Hi everybody,

I'd like to offer my $0.02 to the ongoing discussion.

IIRC we already have some OOB-data channels - ioctl, setsockopt, fcntl ...
to name only a few.

But: we already have a side-band: send with MSG_OOB!
And, as I just saw in the sources, there are some flags free.

So how about defining more than 1 OOB-channel and using them instead of
ioctl and so on?

There could be some bits reserved for the channel - 0 for normal, 1 for
alternate date (MSG_OOB), and eg. -1 for SOL_RAW, -2 for SOL_TCP, -3 for
SOL_IP, ... and so on.
For files there would be 1 layer giving locking functionality.

So, a syscall is already there - we could use this.

For compatibility this change could be undone in libc.

Please don't flame if I didn't see something obvious - everything else is
welcome.

Regards,

Phil