Usage difference between device files, ioctl, sysfs, netlink

devicesioctlsysfs

I'm trying to clarify which is the most useful (in terms of functionality) method of interacting with devices in Linux. As I understand, device files expose only part of functionality (address blocks in block devices, streams in character devices, etc…). ioctl(2) seems to be most commonly used, yet some people says it's not safe, and so on.

Some good articles or other relevant pointers would be welcome.

Best Answer

ioctl tends to go hand-in-hand with a /dev entry; your typical code would do

fd=open("/dev/mydevice",O_RDRW);
ioctl(fd,.....);

This is perfectly standard Unix behaviour. Inside the kernel driver you can put access controls (eg only root can do some things, or require a specific capability for more fine grained access) which makes it pretty flexible and powerful.

Of course this means that devices can expose a lot more than use block/character read-write activity; many things can be done via ioctl calls. Not so easy to use from shell scripts, but pretty easy from C or perl or python or similar.

sysfs entries are another way of interacting with drivers. Typically each type of command would have a different entry, so it can be complicated to write the driver but it makes it very easy to access via userspace; simple shell scripts can manipulate lots of stuff, but may not be very efficient

netlink is primarily focused (I think!) on network data transfers, but it could be used for other stuff. It's really good for larger volumes of data transfer and is meant to be a successor to ioctl in some cases.

All the options are good; your use case may better determine which type of interface to expose from your driver.

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