It's similar to the various knobs in Linux /proc which require reading and writing specially formatted data. ioctl is simpler in that you don't need to worry as much about formatting the data (the struct declarations take care of that for you), but a file-oriented interface is nicer in that it's a higher-level abstraction--for example, it maps better to different languages, similar to how ioctl requires C or C-like shims whereas /proc can be used from any language that understands open/read/write/close, including the shell.