Re: Please open sysfs symbols to proprietary modules

From: Pavel Roskin
Date: Wed Feb 02 2005 - 20:33:30 EST


Hi, Joseph!

On Wed, 2 Feb 2005, Joseph Pingenot wrote:

From Pavel Roskin on Wednesday, 02 February, 2005:
All I want to do is to have a module that would create subdirectories for
some network interfaces under /sys/class/net/*/, which would contain
additional parameters for those interfaces. I'm not creating a new
subsystem or anything like that. sysctl is not good because the data is
interface specific. ioctl on a socket would be OK, although it wouldn't
be easily scriptable. The restriction on sysfs symbols would just force
me to write a proprietary userspace utility to set those parameters
instead of using a shell script.

Please pardon my ignorance, but if the existing network device management
framework is insufficient, it seems that the optimal way to deal with
this is to work with the community to address the insufficiencies, not
hacking in a new interface to the device.

OK, then the "insufficiency" is inability to set and get additional named variables for network interfaces.

I won't open all details, but suppose I want the bridge to handle certain frames in a special way, just like BPDU frames are handled if STP is enabled. There is a hook for that already - see br_handle_frame_hook. The proprietary module would just have to change it.

What I want it to tell that module what to do with those special frames. I also want to get information like what was in the last special frame and how many of them have been received. In other words, I want the proprietary module to communicate with userspace. Ideally, the userspace application should be a simple shell script, so I'm reluctant to use ioctl.

--
Regards,
Pavel Roskin
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