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

Gleb Natapov
2001-01-07T18:52:52Z

On Sun, Jan 07, 2001 at 01:29:51PM -0500, jamal wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, 7 Jan 2001, Ben Greear wrote:
>
> > > My thought was to have the vlan be attached on the interface ifa list and
> > > just give it a different label since it is a "virtual interface" on top
> > > of the "physical interface". Now that you mention the SNMP requirement,
> > > maybe an idea of major:minor ifindex makes sense. Say make the ifindex
> > > a u32 with major 16 bit and minor 16 bit. This way we can have upto 2^16
> > > physical interfaces and upto 2^16 virtual interfaces on the physical
> > > interface. The search will be broken into two 16 bits.
> >
> > 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.
>

And what about bonding device? What major number should they use?

Ifindexes not reusable so in your scheme we should have separate minor
counter for each major interface, what for?

--
Gleb.