From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jeff Garzik Subject: Re: [bonding] Add basic support for dynamic configuration of bond interfaces Date: Sat, 10 Jan 2004 20:34:48 -0500 Sender: netdev-bounce@oss.sgi.com Message-ID: <4000A838.5040808@pobox.com> References: <200401081819.54484.amir.noam@intel.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Jay Vosburgh , bonding-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, netdev@oss.sgi.com Return-path: To: Amir Noam In-Reply-To: <200401081819.54484.amir.noam@intel.com> Errors-to: netdev-bounce@oss.sgi.com List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org Amir Noam wrote: > The following patch sets provide basic support for future bonding > operations (specifically for dynamic configuration of bonding > interfaces). > > This is done by adding two new bonding ioctls: one for deviceless > commands (an ioctl hook) and one for device oriented commands. Like > ethtool, the first u32 value in the data structure will indicate the > exact sub-command to be executed. > > The sets are against the latest netdev-2.4 and net-drivers-2.5-exp > trees. I don't disagree with the overall goal of these patches, but I think we might need to pause a bit, and consider how best to configure, add, and remove bonding interfaces, if we are coming up with a new interface. For configuration tasks that occur outside the scope of a single bonding interface (i.e. a single struct net_device), you need a separate entity from a socket ioctl. It's not ideal at all to configure N objects using a special ioctl ... when opening one of said objects :) I would suggest a simple character device (misc_register), and let the userland application configure settings unrelated to a single object. For a configuring state related to a _single_ bonding interface (i.e. a single net_device), socket ioctls are OK. Jeff