Of course there is. That means that a program accidentally running on
the wrong device will get completely unexpected results because the
ioctl numbers will all be some value above SIOCDEVPRIVATE.
Since each of the drivers have (mostly) their own private ioctl handling,
there is less of an issue of actual ioctl number conflicts as there
is an issue that ioctl numbers should be globally unique to avoid
accidental side effects when running on an incorrect device.
Besides which, SIOCDEVPRIVATE is supposed to be for socket (networking)
ioctls and not just random ioctl values. The comment above it also
indicates this value is deprecated...
Cheers, Andreas
-- Andreas Dilger http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/