On Wed, May 31, 2017 at 11:11 AM, Harald Welte <lafo...@gnumonks.org> wrote: > I mean, what is the *use case* for loosing any refrence to a physical > network device and unregistering it from the stack? Is there any API by > which a new netdevice structure can be instantiated on the actual > hardware? Registering the netdev is what the driver does during > discovering the system hardware. If there's a method to "automagically" > loose devices, at the very least I wold expect some reasonable method to > resurrect them. Unloading the kernel module and reloading it is for > sure not elegant, particularly not if you have multiple Ethernet > devices/ports sharing the same driver. > > One could e.g. also think of something like a special namespace that > collects all the "orphan" netdevices. Something analogous to the old > Unix tradition of "pid 1" collecting all the orphan tasks whose parents > died. Transferring them into that "netdev orphanage" could > automatically set the link down so that no accidential > routing/forwarding of traffic between the devices is possible.
Understand. But you have other choices than using the physical interface directly in non-root ns, for example, creating a virtual pair and connect it with the physical one with a bridge. There are various ways to achieve this.
