From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Johannes Berg Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/3] net: add device groups Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2011 15:08:25 +0100 Message-ID: <1294668505.3583.9.camel@jlt3.sipsolutions.net> References: <1294659524-22509-1-git-send-email-ddvlad@rosedu.org> <1294666875.3583.6.camel@jlt3.sipsolutions.net> <1294668021.6063.315.camel@mojatatu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Vlad Dogaru , Octavian Purdila , netdev To: hadi@cyberus.ca Return-path: Received: from he.sipsolutions.net ([78.46.109.217]:58425 "EHLO sipsolutions.net" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753650Ab1AJOI3 (ORCPT ); Mon, 10 Jan 2011 09:08:29 -0500 In-Reply-To: <1294668021.6063.315.camel@mojatatu> Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Mon, 2011-01-10 at 09:00 -0500, jamal wrote: > 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 Right, but where would you want to use it -- what's the use case right now? Your ppp example here makes me think the use case is some PPP endpoint server that has lots of these interfaces. It also means the grouping is entirely user-space controlled. In this case, the idea of automatically grouping based on the device structure seems pointless. johannes