Ben Greear wrote: > Patrick McHardy wrote: > >> It would be nice if someone would finally come up with a generic >> interface based on netlink (RTM_NEWLINK) instead of adding yet >> another couple of homegrown interfaces. > > > My preference is for ioctls, procfs, or similar that does not > require extra libraries. Ethtool is an ioctl based approach, > so that could potentially be used, though I'm not sure if > that's the right place to put it...
Extra libraries is one of the least important points in my opinion, I also guess pretty much anyone using a software device already has iproute installed, which could easily support all of them. The more important things to consider are in my opinion extendability and atomicity of changes and dumps: - ioctls: atomicity, not easily extendable - sysfs: no atomicity, easily extendable - procfs: if atomicity not easily extendable, but can of course also be used similar to sysfs Only netlink offers both in an easy to use fashion and is already used for the main parts of network configuration anyway. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
