Re: mirred, redirect action vs. dev refcount issue

[David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>]

From: Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@vyatta.com>
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2010 16:52:47 -0700

> On Wed, 21 Jul 2010 16:39:55 -0700 (PDT)
> David Miller <davem@davemloft.net> wrote:
> 
>> If it is the action rule holding onto the device, it should have
>> an appropriate netdevice notifier handler.
> 
> There is no notifier there, and the module doesn't keep track of
> list of filters. So that is why it has to be done at act api level.

Any rule, or route, or whatever that makes references to devices must
transparently accomodate the requested removal or downing of a device.

There is no way around this.

So either the action code needs to keep track of it's table entries on
some global list that can be traversed at notifier time, or we go with
the ifindex thing.

Whether the ifindex or the global list + delete scheme is better is a
topic for discussion.  Since from the user's perspective it is unclear
which semantic is less surprising, entries disappearing or suddenly
stop working (or start applying to a different device which has taken
a previous one's ifindex!).