Garrett D'Amore wrote: > 1) Currently GLDv3 exports DLPI style 2 nodes, as does GLDv2. I think > this adds complexity, and ultimately I think everyone would be better > served if we could eliminate this. I'd like to propose EOF'ing the > export of DLPI style 2 from GLDv3 (and incidentally from softmac.)
What would be the point? We would never be able to remove the feature, as there's a fair amount of third-party code that relies on it, and as DLPIv2 Style 2 is actually a standards-compliant interface. Sun (at least in the past) has been rather hesitant to discard fundamental standards. For an arbitrary example (pulled up by google), check out this function: http://svn.dd-wrt.com:8000/dd-wrt/browser/src/router/pppd.new/pppd/sys-solaris.c?rev=7630#L2215 What makes it doubly weird is that for a very long time, the *only* sort of interface supported on Solaris was in fact Style 2. All the old "le"-derived interfaces were Style 2 only, and it was such a common thing on Sun platforms that everyone (outside of Sun) *assumed* that Style 2 was the expected norm. Style 1 is relatively newfangled and, in the field, still extremely rare compared with Style 2. That leaves you with only a worry-producing EOF notice, and no actual removal. Why bother? The EOF notice itself won't help the code much, will it? > 2) Support for DLPI based ethernet device drivers. Right now we have > one major hold out (ce), which we *could* fix, but even if we don't > *remove* the DLPI interfaces in softmac, once GLDv3 becomes a public > interface, I think we ought to make the legacy GLDv2 and DLPI methods as > Obsolete. Eventually it might even be possible to remove them, either > by updating the existing drivers, or by EOF'ing the final hold outs. How do you EOF third party drivers? You will in fact need a Major release boundary (in that future day) in order to remove an in-use standards-compliant interface. > Eventually I'd like to remove DLPI style 2 altogether, but from what I > can tell, it is still crucially used with ppp where the instance (PPA) > is created on demand in response to DL_ATTACH_REQ. I don't have a good > answer for that kind of usage. Nor do I. It's currently much simpler than the sort of gyrations that would be needed to make Style 1 work, and given that the differences between the two styles are mostly trivial and related just to open()-time messaging, it's hard to see why we'd want to care enough to kill Style 2. -- James Carlson 42.703N 71.076W <[email protected]> _______________________________________________ networking-discuss mailing list [email protected]
