Re: [PATCH 2.6] vlan ioctl propagation (rev.2)

bert hubert wrote:

On Fri, Aug 06, 2004 at 02:39:28PM -0700, Stephen Hemminger wrote:

quoted

Here is a redo of the patch to propagate ethtool and mii ioctl's
on vlan's to the underlying real device.  This time the request
is copied to a new buffer, to avoid the colon name rewrite issues.

Is this really what we want? We also don't make virtual IPs appear as real
interfaces anymore. Virtual devices are just that - virtual.

Hi Bert,

Please don't be so absolute. For example, if the virtual device "link" status
doesn't reflect that of the real device then routing software needs to parse
the virtual->real device mappings (a parsing for which Linux provides only
limited support).

Worse still, we now need to special-case virtual interfaces in application
code:
    while (virtual_interface(interface_name)) {
      virtual_to_real(interface_name, &interface_name);
    }

This is the sort of nasty detail than operating systems are meant to abstract
away from application code.

Thanks,
Glen