Jim,
It may also be possible to remove the need for DLPI for IPv4, and incidentally simplify the code a fair amount, by adding a kernel option to allow transmission and reception of UDP packets over interfaces that are plumbed but not marked IFF_UP. This is left for future work.
How aggressively do you think we should try to get the use of DLPI out of dhcpagent?
We would need to revise how IP determines to bring up its DLPI provider (DL_ATTACH_REQ, DL_BIND_REQ) which today doesn't happen until the interface is both IFF_UP and has a non-zero IPv4 address. But we could potentially do this immediately when ifconfig plumb happens. (Doing it at plumb time might also help us simplify the locking in IP; less of a need for ILL_CHANGING if we do the DLPI attach and bind e.g. when handling the SIOCSLIFNAME ioctl; we can defer inserting the ill in the global list of ills until this point in time.)
Once IP has the DLPI stream in place, then IP_XMIT_IF, IP_NEXTHOP, etc should be able to send packets by just specifying the interface index.
Erik _______________________________________________ networking-discuss mailing list [email protected]
