Re: [RFD w/info-PATCH] device arguments from lookup, partion code

[Linus Torvalds]

On Sun, 20 May 2001, Alexander Viro wrote:
> 
> Pheeew... Could you spell "about megabyte of stuff in ioctl.c"?

I agree. But it would certainly force people to think about this. And it
may turn out that a lot of it can be streamlined, and not that much ends
up being used very much.

It would also allow a single place of catching the generic ones, and as
such be a place to try to make things like the network ioctl's more
regular: setting things like network device duplex with _real_ interfaces
instead of hiding it in ioctl routines.

Also, note that many ioctl's actually do have fairly regular meaning, and
that it _is_ possible to catch a number of them with those regular
things:

	switch (_IOC_TYPE(number)) {
	case 'x':
		xfs_ioctl(..);

and actually try to enforce the things that Documentation/ioctl-number.txt
tries to document. And make the clashes _explicit_ and thus make people
have more incentive to really try to fix it.

> How about moratorium on new ioctls in the meanwhile? Whatever we do in
> fs/ioctl.c, it _will_ take time.

Ehh.. Telling people "don't do that" simply doesn't work. Not if they can
do it easily anyway. Things really don't get fixed unless people have a
certain pain-level to induce it to get fixed.

		Linus