Nitpick: DRM files also support mmap(), which is how you map video memory into user space. To your overall point though: do you think there's something better?

Nitpick: DRM files also support mmap(), which is how you map video memory into user space. To your overall point though: do you think there's something better? The operations required by user-mode drivers and APIs just don't map well to file operations. On the other hand, creating dedicated syscalls for graphics isn't very attractive either, because many of the ioctls are quite hardware-specific. Using ioctls is a pragmatic solution, and I doubt you can really come up with something much better, though I'd be interested in being proven wrong.