jamal wrote:
On Tue, 2005-26-07 at 09:54 -0700, Ben Greear wrote:
[..]
You will need to enforce that nothing else gets the index 34 while eth7 is
removed.
How do you do that?
Thats trivial if you assume there's one management app which most of the
router vendors implementing it have. It will get tricky when you have 10
apps fighting to get index 34 for other devices.
You could of course enforce a reserved set of indices right on bootup
via a kernel option for example; but that doesnt solve a stupid admin
with 10 scripts all fighting for index 34 each for a different device.
If you try to put that into the kernel, you
have a big nasty mess, and if you try to make user-space do it, any bogus
script can hose your system and potentially screw up your firewall and
worse.
Refer to above. It can actually be solved and not in a big mess like you
say. The question is whether such a feature is needed.
I don't see a good reason for the feature, or at least nothing that
justifies the work of trying to implement it. What benefits do you
envision?
I believe this discussion originally came about because we can save
4 bytes by storing the ifindex instead of a pointer to the netdevice (on 64-bit
machines).
However, the cost of doing so is a netdev_get_by_index() and some
scheme of making the ifindexes persistent. I don't think the saving of 4 bytes
is worth
either of these costs, much less both together.
Ben
--
Ben Greear <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Candela Technologies Inc http://www.candelatech.com
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