Re: [RFC] make per interface sysctl entries configurable

[Cosmin Ratiu <cratiu@ixiacom.com>]

On Monday 26 October 2009 00:21:48 Octavian Purdila wrote:
> On Sunday 25 October 2009 23:37:19 you wrote:
> > Octavian Purdila a écrit :
> > > RFC patches are attached.
> > >
> > > Another possible approach: add an interface flag and use it to decide
> > > whether we want per interface sysctl entries or not.
> >
> > Hmm, could we speedup sysctl instead, adding rbtree or something ?
> 
> Very good point, I think this is the best solution for people using a
> moderately high number of interfaces (a few thousand).
> 
> But for really large setups there is another issue: memory consumption. In
> fact, in order to be able to scale to 128K interfaces and still have a
> significant amount of memory available to applications we also had to
>  disable sysfs and #ifdef CONFIG_SYSFS struct device from net_device.
> 
> I would also argue that when you have such a large number of interfaces you
> don't need to change setting on a per interface basis. Or at least this is
>  our case :)  and I suspect that the case with a large number of PPP
>  interfaces is similar.
> 

Another possible approach: shared settings for an interface group. If you have 
a large number of interfaces of the same type it would be nice if you could 
change some setting for the whole group instead of globally or individually. 

Is this approach feasible anyway? Or I'm talking rubbish.

Cosmin.