David Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > From: Patrick McHardy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2007 18:58:13 +0200 > >> 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. > > I absolutely agree, using these ioctls and sysfs/procfs crap > is totally insane given that we have a core mechanism for > network configuration.
The core mechanism for network configuration does not support creating virtual devices in a extensible reusable way. In particular the tunnel types supported by iproute2 are hard coded into the user space tool and into the kernel interface. The interface seems to be not the least bit extensible for creating new types of non hardware backed network devices. So I don't see a readily usable mechanism for network configuration in netlink. The fact that netlink it uses unreliable packets and an asynchronous interface just adds to the difficulty in making use of it. Nor have I seen a rigorous adherence to all new network configuration using netlink. The wireless code doesn't even seem to really try. So I don't believe anyone has found a good maintainable, unix compatible configuration mechanism for maintaining anything yet. Regardless I really don't care what the interface is as long as people agree and I don't have to rewrite significant portions of user space to allow people to use it. Since whatever user space interface we pick we will be stuck with we might as well review it as closely as we can and figure out what we can live with. Just to be contrary I'm tempted to add a sysctl interface. No one has even mentioned class of user space interfaces yet. Eric - 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
