From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: jamal Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/3] net: add device groups Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2011 09:00:21 -0500 Message-ID: <1294668021.6063.315.camel@mojatatu> References: <1294659524-22509-1-git-send-email-ddvlad@rosedu.org> <1294666875.3583.6.camel@jlt3.sipsolutions.net> Reply-To: hadi@cyberus.ca Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Vlad Dogaru , Octavian Purdila , netdev To: Johannes Berg Return-path: Received: from mail-qw0-f46.google.com ([209.85.216.46]:46441 "EHLO mail-qw0-f46.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751710Ab1AJOAV (ORCPT ); Mon, 10 Jan 2011 09:00:21 -0500 Received: by qwa26 with SMTP id 26so19787472qwa.19 for ; Mon, 10 Jan 2011 06:00:21 -0800 (PST) In-Reply-To: <1294666875.3583.6.camel@jlt3.sipsolutions.net> Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Mon, 2011-01-10 at 14:41 +0100, Johannes Berg wrote: > Can you explain the purpose of this? I'm wondering if it would make > sense to automatically group all virtual interfaces belonging to a > single 802.11 device, for instance. It depends what you want to do with that grouping. In a nutshell, this greatly reduces the amount of kernel-user netlink traffic in presence of multi interfaces. you can do things like: ip link set dev ppp0 group 1 ... ... ip link set dev pppN group 1 ip link ls group 1 ip link set down group 1 ip link set mtu 512 group 1 etc Although now that i am thinking of it, I am not sure whether it would be a legit thing to change the MAC address of a group of devices - we may need to put some restrictions. Note: this grouping thing can also be potentially used in packet policies etc (but i dont want to distract the simple requirement we have at the moment). cheers, jamal