On Sat, 21 May 2022 12:45:46 -0400
Kent Overstreet [off-list ref] wrote:

On Fri, May 20, 2022 at 10:31:02PM +0200, Andrew Lunn wrote:

quoted

quoted

I want to circulate this and get some comments and feedback, and if
no one raises any serious objections - I'd love to get collaborators
to work on this with me. Flame away!  

Hi Kent

I doubt you will get much interest from netdev. netdev already
considers ioctl as legacy, and mostly uses netlink and a message
passing structure, which is easy to extend in a backwards compatible
manor.  

The more I look at netlink the more I wonder what on earth it's targeted at or
was trying to solve. It must exist for a reason, but I've written a few ioctls
myself and I can't fathom a situation where I'd actually want any of the stuff
netlink provides.

Netlink was built for networking operations, you want to set something like a route with a large
number of varying parameters in one transaction. And you don't want to have to invent
a new system call every time a new option is added.

Also, you want to monitor changes and see these events for a userspace control
application such as a routing daemon.