Running on bare hardware

[Casey Dahlin]

On Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 10:23:18PM +0100, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> * Dave Airlie <airlied at gmail.com> schrieb:
> 
> > The proper way is to design ioctls so compat layers aren't needed, to work
> > across all 32/64 combos, so that means using 64-bit aligned types as much
> > as possible, and padding to make sure 64-bit types don't end up unaligned.
> 
> Until, in several years, pointers get larger than 64bit ;-p

Most of us intend to be retired or dead by then.

> 
> Actually, I still didn't get the point why such simple things
> have to be ioctl()s (which are unportable and and local-only
> by design). Why not just using plain file operations ?
> 
> (eg. getting the version info could be as simple as someting like:
> `cat /dev/dri/version`)
> 

I doubt you'll get much weight behind it, but a small demonstrative
patch to linux-api would be the right way to start that conversation.

--CJD