Using sysfs for configuring wireless networking

Using sysfs for configuring wireless networking

That's starting to sound fairly brutal, don't you think? The cure might be worse than the disease.

I realize one of the key features of sysfs is that there's one value per file (try to avoid the mess that became /proc), but lack of atomic updates seems a rather fundamental limitation. What about writing multiple values to a write-only file?

echo "essid=bug;key=gazpacho" > /sys/class/net/eth1/config

Escaping would be required, of course, but that's easily solved.

I don't understand why a netlink socket would be an improvement... It requires parsing, like /proc, but is not user-configurable, like ioctls. It's the worst of both worlds!