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 19:17:23 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Tue, 19 Jun 2001 19:17:12 -0400 Received: from cx97923-a.phnx3.az.home.com ([24.9.112.194]:54468 "EHLO grok.yi.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Tue, 19 Jun 2001 19:16:57 -0400 Message-ID: <3B2FDD62.EFC6AEB1@candelatech.com> Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2001 16:16:50 -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: "David S. Miller" CC: Dax Kelson , "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" , Holger Kiehl , VLAN Mailing List , "vlan-devel (other)" , Lennert , Gleb Natapov Subject: Re: Should VLANs be devices or something else? In-Reply-To: <3B2FCE0C.67715139@candelatech.com> <15151.55017.371775.585016@pizda.ninka.net> 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 "David S. Miller" wrote: > > Dax Kelson writes: > > On Tue, 19 Jun 2001, Ben Greear wrote: > > > Should VLANs be devices or some other thing? > > > > I would vote that VLANs be devices. > > > > Conceptually, VLANs as network devices is a no brainer. > > Conceptually, svr4 streams are a beautiful and elegant > mechanism. :-) > > Technical implementation level concerns need to be considered > as well as "does it look nice". I found it to be the easiest way to implement things. It allowed me to not have to touch any of layer 3, and I did not have to patch any user-space program like ip or ifconfig. I'm not even sure if the nay-sayers ever had another idea, they just didn't like having lots of interfaces. Originally, there were claims of inefficiency, but it seems that other than things like 'ip' and ifconfig, there are no serious performance problems I am aware of. Adding the hashed lookup for devices took the exponential curve out of ip and ifconfig's performance, btw. -- Ben Greear President of Candela Technologies Inc http://www.candelatech.com ScryMUD: http://scry.wanfear.com http://scry.wanfear.com/~greear