Well, the kernel would have to provide the same interfaces for "cat" if
you did it that way, and it would probably take up more space and cause
more kernel bloat.
And we'd still have to have the old interfaces for backwards compatibility
for ifconfig.
Is the "magic ioctl" approach ugly? Sure. But it's fairly well contained
to just one program (ifconfig), and everybody else just uses that. I think
it's less horrible than the alternatives right now.
Linus
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