From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Tue, 19 Jun 2001 18:11:49 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Tue, 19 Jun 2001 18:11:39 -0400 Received: from cx97923-a.phnx3.az.home.com ([24.9.112.194]:17860 "EHLO grok.yi.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Tue, 19 Jun 2001 18:11:28 -0400 Message-ID: <3B2FCE0C.67715139@candelatech.com> Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2001 15:11:25 -0700 From: Ben Greear Organization: Candela Technologies X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.76 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.2-2 i686) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org CC: Holger Kiehl , "David S. Miller" , VLAN Mailing List , "vlan-devel (other)" , Lennert , Gleb Natapov Subject: Should VLANs be devices or something else? In-Reply-To: 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 I have had a good discussion with Dave Miller today, and there is one outstanding issue to clear up before my 802.1Q VLAN patch may be considered for acceptance into the kernel: Should VLANs be devices or some other thing? I strongly feel that they should be devices for many reasons. 1) It makes integration with user-space tools (ip, ifconfig, arp...) a non-issue. 2) It is logically correct, a VLAN is a (net_)device and in all ways acts like one. 3) It introduces no fast-path performance degradation that I know of. The one slow path involves the linear lookup of a device by name (or id??). This can be fixed by hashing the list, if needed. 4) Both VLAN patches have used VLANs-as-devices from the beginning, and have seen no ill affects to this approach that would be mitigated by some other architecture. However, we need the community as a whole to agree more-or-less that my (and others who share them) arguments are sound. So please, bring your complaints fowards now...or forever patch by hand! Also, any other complaints or suggestions for the VLAN code should be mentioned too, of course! If you wish to view the patch, get the 1.0.1 release from my vlan page: http://scry.wanfear.com/~greear/vlan.html I will release a new one shortly with the fast-dev-lookup code (which is already #ifdef'd out) completely removed, as per Dave's wish. Thanks, Ben -- Ben Greear President of Candela Technologies Inc http://www.candelatech.com ScryMUD: http://scry.wanfear.com http://scry.wanfear.com/~greear