Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Sat, 17 Jun 2000 15:32:39 -0700
From:      Mike Smith <msmith@freebsd.org>
To:        "Louis A. Mamakos" <louie@TransSys.COM>
Cc:        cvs-committers@FreeBSD.ORG, cvs-all@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: src/sys/sys sockio.h src/sys/net if.c src/sbin/ifconfig ifconfig.8 ifconfig.c 
Message-ID:  <200006172232.PAA01562@mass.osd.bsdi.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 17 Jun 2000 17:43:20 EDT." <200006172143.RAA05513@whizzo.transsys.com> 

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> > > 
> > > But how many new media-specific keywords can ifconfig withstand over
> > > time?
> > 
> > As many as there are address families that require them.
> > 
> > > I was only suggesting that there be one generic one; perhaps "lladdr"
> > > isn't the most mnemonic and something else is more suitable.
> > 
> > Why bother with a keyword at all?  I mean, why bother distinguishing 
> > between "inet" and "ether"?
> 
> I supposed because inet and inet6 are used to specify L3 addresses which
> have significant semantic import to the network protocol stacks.  These
> L2 or physical layer addresses are merely glue to make the "connectedness"
> of the network interface work.

That's not taking a very abstracted view of things, though.  You could 
argue that the ethernet address has very significant semantic import to 
the ARP layer as well.

> I guess it isn't that big a deal; I'd be more concerned if there wasn't
> a way to use the same ioctl to pass the information into the kernel for
> different interface types.  The rest is just UI sugar coating to make
> it easy to use.

In practice, I think that we should really use a single ioctl and pass 
the type and value in separately and let the stack itself decide what to 
do about it.  The current approach is just not dynamic enough. 8(

-- 
\\ Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. \\  Mike Smith
\\ Tell him he should learn how to fish himself,  \\  msmith@freebsd.org
\\ and he'll hate you for a lifetime.             \\  msmith@cdrom.com




To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe cvs-all" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200006172232.PAA01562>