I have what seems to be a fairly common problem.  I'm working on a
network device driver, and I really need to be able to define a few
specific ioctl's for dealing with things like uploading and downloading
firmware to the card, tweaking tuning parameters, etc.  Just as a
temporary hack, I've allocated myself a few ioctl commands in the 'i'
space, as these are actually passed down to the network devices.  That
doesn't seem like a very scalable solution.

Should I just have a character device interface to my driver, merely
for the ioctl's?  This is a HIPPI driver, so a non-network interface
would make sense, but what about other drivers?  Is there some more
general solution to this problem?  And what about the name-space
pollution of defining yet one more application which is only useful for
tweaking my device?  Is there a better way?  Could I use sysctl's?

Thanks,

Kevin