Got some statistics information of our custom hardware to be displayed whenever user asks for using a command in the Linux user space. This implementation is currently uses PROC interface. We started adding more statistics information then we encountered a problem wherein the particular statistics command had to be executed twice for getting the entire data as PROC interface was restricted to 1 page.
As mentioned above the data transfer between the kernel and the user space is not critical but as per the data some decisions might be taken by the user. Our requirement for this interface design is that it should be capable of transferring amount of data maybe greater that 8192 bytes and the command needs to use minimal kernel resources (like locks etc.,) and it needs to be quick.
Using ioctl can solve the issue but since the command is exactly not controlling the device but to collect some statistics information, not sure whether it is a good mechanism to use as per Linux. We are currently using 3.4 kernel; not sure whether Netlink is lossy in this version (Previous versions I came across issues like when the queue becomes full, socket starts to drop data). mmap is another option . Can anyone suggest me what would be the best interface to use
You can do a ioctl IO call (rather than IOR, IOW, or IORW). Ioctl's can be very useful for collecting information. You'll have a lot of flexibility this way in that you can pass different size buffers or structs to fill with data.
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