From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Sun, 7 Jan 2001 14:39:21 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Sun, 7 Jan 2001 14:39:01 -0500 Received: from cx97923-a.phnx3.az.home.com ([24.9.112.194]:20750 "EHLO grok.yi.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Sun, 7 Jan 2001 14:38:50 -0500 Message-ID: <3A58D49D.C4152BD5@candelatech.com> Date: Sun, 07 Jan 2001 13:42:05 -0700 From: Ben Greear Organization: Candela Technologies X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.16 i586) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Sandy Harris CC: jamal , linux-kernel , "netdev@oss.sgi.com" Subject: Re: routable interfaces WAS( Re: [PATCH] hashed device lookup(DoesNOT meet Linus' sumission policy!) In-Reply-To: <3A58C137.63907CDC@storm.ca> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org 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 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/