Re: routable interfaces WAS( Re: [PATCH] hashed device lookup(DoesNOT meet Linus' sumission policy!)

[Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech.com>]

Sandy Harris wrote:
> 
> jamal wrote:
> 
> > > What problem does this fix?
> > >
> > > If you are mucking with the ifindex, you may be affecting many places
> > > in the rest of the kernel, as well as user-space programs which use
> > > ifindex to bind to raw devices.
> >
> > I am talking about 2.5 possibilities now that 2.4 is out. I think
> > "parasitic/virtual" interfaces is not a issue specific to VLANs.
> > VLANs happen to use devices today to solve the problem.
> > As pointed by that example no routing daemons are doing aliased
> > interfaces (which are also virtual interfaces).
> > We need some more general solution.
> >
> Something like this also becomes an issue when you want routing
> daemons to interact sensibly with IPSEC tunnels. A paper on these
> issues is at:
> 
> http://www.quintillion.com/fdis/moat/ipsec+routing/
> 
> It is not (AFAIK) clear that the FreeS/WAN team will adopt the solutions
> suggested there, but it is very clear we need to deal with those issues.

Hrm, what if they just made each IP-SEC interface a net_device?  If they
are a routable entity, with it's own IP address, it starts to look a lot
like an interface/net_device.

This has seeming worked well for VLANs:  Maybe net_device is already
general enough??

So, what would be the down-side of having VLANs and other virtual interfaces
be net_devices?  The only thing I ever thought of was the linear lookups,
which is why I wrote the hash code.  The beauty of working with existing
user-space tools should not be over-looked!

It may be easier to fix other problems with many interface/net_devices
than cram a whole other virtual net_device structure (with many duplicate
functionalities found in the current net_device).

Ben

-- 
Ben Greear (greearb@candelatech.com)  http://www.candelatech.com
Author of ScryMUD:  scry.wanfear.com 4444        (Released under GPL)
http://scry.wanfear.com               http://scry.wanfear.com/~greear
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