Interface)
Reply-To:
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
X-Chocolate: 70 percent or better cocoa solids preferably
X-Operating-System: Linux/2.4.18 (i686)
X-Uptime: 19:19:16 up 1 day, 6:46, 5 users, load average: 2.00, 2.00, 2.00
* Linus Torvalds ([email protected]) wrote:
> On 9 Jun 2002, Kai Henningsen wrote:
> >
> > However, I don't think that's all that important. What I'd rather see is
> > making the network devices into namespace nodes. The situation of eth0 and
> > friends, from a Unix perspective, is utterly unnatural.
>
> But what would you _do_ with them? What would be the advantage as compared
> to the current situation?
Personally I would do away with ifconfig and replace it with
cat in and out of device nodes; ifconfig seems to suffer about having to
know about every protocol on every device type and the kernel has to
provide interfaces for it that only it uses.
Dave
---------------- Have a happy GNU millennium! ----------------------
/ Dr. David Alan Gilbert | Running GNU/Linux on Alpha,68K| Happy \
\ gro.gilbert @ treblig.org | MIPS,x86,ARM, SPARC and HP-PA | In Hex /
\ _________________________|_____ http://www.treblig.org |_______/
On Sun, 9 Jun 2002, Dr. David Alan Gilbert wrote:
>
> Personally I would do away with ifconfig and replace it with
> cat in and out of device nodes; ifconfig seems to suffer about having to
> know about every protocol on every device type and the kernel has to
> provide interfaces for it that only it uses.
Well, the kernel would have to provide the same interfaces for "cat" if
you did it that way, and it would probably take up more space and cause
more kernel bloat.
And we'd still have to have the old interfaces for backwards compatibility
for ifconfig.
Is the "magic ioctl" approach ugly? Sure. But it's fairly well contained
to just one program (ifconfig), and everybody else just uses that. I think
it's less horrible than the alternatives right now.
Linus
[email protected] (Linus Torvalds) wrote on 09.06.02 in <[email protected]>:
> Is the "magic ioctl" approach ugly? Sure. But it's fairly well contained
> to just one program (ifconfig), and everybody else just uses that. I think
> it's less horrible than the alternatives right now.
If it *were* all contained in ifconfig, you'd be right, but that isn't
even remotely true.
There are a *huge* number of programs that know about network interfaces.
Apart from ifconfig, we have route, routed, iptables, ip, bootloads of
admin scripts for device configuration, for firewalling, pppd anmd
scripts, arp, dhcpd, portsentry, and I haven't even really scratched the
surface here.
Sure, in the old times, when you could get Unix(tm) with or without the
"networking option" for extra money, there wasn't much. But that has
dramatically changed in these Internet times.
MfG Kai
Actually, networking is moving in the direction described --
yes, as Linus points out, we will need the magic ioctl stuff for back
compat.
But the main way to communicate with a net device is netlink, already a
chardev. ifconfig actually should be updated to use netlink.
Jeff
On Tue, 11 Jun 2002 07:44, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> Actually, networking is moving in the direction described --
> yes, as Linus points out, we will need the magic ioctl stuff for back
> compat.
> But the main way to communicate with a net device is netlink, already a
> chardev. ifconfig actually should be updated to use netlink.
Is there any documentation on the netlink API, beyond UTSL(iproute)?
Reference would be good, but a tutorial would be ideal.
Brad
--
http://conf.linux.org.au. 22-25Jan2003. Perth, Australia. Birds in Black.
Brad Hards wrote:
> On Tue, 11 Jun 2002 07:44, Jeff Garzik wrote:
>
>>Actually, networking is moving in the direction described --
>>yes, as Linus points out, we will need the magic ioctl stuff for back
>>compat.
>>But the main way to communicate with a net device is netlink, already a
>>chardev. ifconfig actually should be updated to use netlink.
>
> Is there any documentation on the netlink API, beyond UTSL(iproute)?
> Reference would be good, but a tutorial would be ideal.
I don't know of any... Alexey/DaveM/Jamal are probably the best people
to ask.
Jeff
ifconfig is "so yesterday" as it is, ip is incredibly more capable. I
would gently push ifconfig into the dungeons of time.
-d
Jeff Garzik wrote:
> Actually, networking is moving in the direction described --
> yes, as Linus points out, we will need the magic ioctl stuff for back
> compat.
> But the main way to communicate with a net device is netlink, already
> a chardev. ifconfig actually should be updated to use netlink.