From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Glen Turner <glen.turner@aarnet.edu.au>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2.6] vlan ioctl propagation (rev.2)
Date: Sun, 08 Aug 2004 14:08:36 +0930
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Cc: Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@osdl.org>,
        "David S. Miller" <davem@redhat.com>, netdev@oss.sgi.com
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To: bert hubert <ahu@ds9a.nl>
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bert hubert wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 06, 2004 at 02:39:28PM -0700, Stephen Hemminger wrote:
> 
>>Here is a redo of the patch to propagate ethtool and mii ioctl's
>>on vlan's to the underlying real device.  This time the request
>>is copied to a new buffer, to avoid the colon name rewrite issues.
> 
> 
> Is this really what we want? We also don't make virtual IPs appear as real
> interfaces anymore. Virtual devices are just that - virtual.

Hi Bert,

Please don't be so absolute. For example, if the virtual device "link" status
doesn't reflect that of the real device then routing software needs to parse
the virtual->real device mappings (a parsing for which Linux provides only
limited support).

Worse still, we now need to special-case virtual interfaces in application
code:
    while (virtual_interface(interface_name)) {
      virtual_to_real(interface_name, &interface_name);
    }

This is the sort of nasty detail than operating systems are meant to abstract
away from application code.

Thanks,
Glen