Which people didn't like it? ;-)
AFAIK Linus and Al Viro (and myself <g>) have always considered ioctls
an ugly -ism that should have never made it into Unix. Over and above
the Unix/VFS design problems with ioctl(2), ioctl(2) is a pain for
people like David Miller who must maintain 32<->64 bit ioctl translation
layers for their architecture. ia64 and x64-64 must do this too. Each
ioctl you add is an additional headache for them.
We now have libfs.c in 2.5.x that makes ramfs-based filesystems even
more tiny, too. With the added flexibility of an fs -- it makes the
userland tools much more simple and sane -- and the pain of ioctls, it
seems a clear choice for new interfaces.
Jeff
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