[TUHS] VFS prior to 1984

[Dave Horsfall]

On Tue, 23 Jun 2020, Warner Losh wrote:

> > Ioctl: the Swiss Army knife of system calls.  I thought it was a neat 
> > idea when it arrived (much better then those primitive stty/gtty 
> > calls) but now...
> 
> More like the swiss army chainsaw with engine trouble and a dull 
> blade....

(Slowly drifting off-topic (as all mailing lists do) so perhaps a new 
thread would be better.)

Love it!  On the other hand though, if an extra service is required of the 
OS and you don't want to extend ioctl(), then that means Yet Another 
System Call (tm).  I really like the idea of /proc, so if there's an 
equivalent for ioctl() then I'd love to see it; /sys would be an obvious 
choice, but it's already taken (Harris' Lament).

No doubt, someone will now chime in and say that there's an existing 
mechanism involving shared memory or something...  My Unix-fu is getting 
rather long in the tooth now (just like me).

-- Dave