[PATCH net-2.6][NEIGH] Updating affected neighbours about MAC address change

["David Shwatrz" <dshwatrz@gmail.com>]

Hello,

 We know that changes in MAC addresses are not frequent but
we are working on a special, highly advanced networking Linux based project
in our LABs, where we do change MAC addresses of an interface quite frequently.
(We do not go totally wild; the MAC addresses we are changing into are
from a set of given MAC addresses).

Normally, when we change a MAC address of some interface, the
relevant neighbours in the LAN which have entries with the previous MAC
address are not sent any update notification; instead, it is there
regular timers mechanisms which update the MAC address to the new
one in their ARP tables.

I had written a small patch to neigh_changeaddr() in net/core/neighbour.c
against the 2.6 git net tree, which sends a gratuitous ARP to update
the list of
all the involved neighbours with the change of MAC address.
The patch is for neigh_changeaddr() only.

This patch was tested and it does work in my LAB; if such a patch is
not needed,
I wonder why ?
It seems to me that it could not cause any troubles.
BTW, I had noticed that in irlan driver, there is such a mechanism
of sending a gratuitous ARP to update all the
neighbours when a MAC address is changed.

Signed-off-by: David Shwatrz <dshwatrz@gmail.com>