[nycbug-talk] BSDCan-ikenotes - 'ioctl is soooo 1980s'

[Isaac Levy]

More BSDCan ike-notes,

Poul-Henning Kamp was everywhere it seemed, he gave a great 
presentation titled 'ioctl is just soooo 1980ies', (slides included a 
picture of the A-Team, among other important 80's ideas/ideals).  With 
that, he went through a history of the ioctl system call, it's 
importance, it's kludginess, and his proposed solutions- which are 
closely tied to his other abstraction-type works in GEOM.
Coming soon to a FreeBSD Kernel near you, g_ctl and nmount.  Basically, 
to summarize a fairly complicated topic, PHK is trying to abstract 
every device, and provide a unified interface through the kernel to 
devices.  Cool stuff- can't wait until the dust starts to settle on 
this stuff... :)

The lecture slides are here:
http://phk.freebsd.dk/pubs/bsdcan2005_ioctl.pdf

- Personal sidenote, PHK discussed passing text into the kernel, or 
even structured text in the form of XML, which piqued the 
counter-argument from our own Bob Ippolito- (as I sat in the back 
grinning... :)- Bob  and I had been up into the wee hours the night 
before, discussing the text/xml vs. binary formatting issue, sparked by 
changes to Darwin/OSX metadata files going binary.  Bob argued that the 
binary formats, if accompanied by proper tools to construct the binary 
data, can have much saner real-world application for critical data i/o 
operations in a given program.  I tend to agree with Bob on this one, 
citing a recent adventure in hell, implementing the DMOZ xml dump in a 
client project- in a nutshell, XML breaks, text parsing breaks, and 
it's extremely difficult to focus on what one is *doing* with the data- 
whereas things like database dumps and the like at the least help focus 
a developer on the actual data, by taking care of the formatting and 
presenting focused apis/applications for using the data.

6 of one, half-dozen of the other- this entire arguement is not a new 
one.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch05s01.html

Regardless of the semantics of how it all works out, I'm really exited 
to see PHK's replacements for ioctl take off like GEOM has!

Rocket-
.ike