Re: [Bcm43xx-dev] [Fwd: State of the Union: Wireless]

On Fri, 06 Jan 2006 13:46:15 +0100
Patrick McHardy [off-list ref] wrote:

Marcel Holtmann wrote:

quoted

quoted

I just personally liked the idea of having a device node in /dev for
every existing hardware wlan card. Like we have device nodes for
other real hardware, too. It felt like a bit of a "unix way" to do
this to me. I don't say this is the way to go.
If a netlink socket is used (which is possible, for sure), we stay with
the old way of having no device node in /dev for networking devices.
That is ok. But that is really only an implementation detail (and for sure
a matter of taste).

At the OLS last year, I think the consensus was to use netlink for all
configuration task. However this was mainly driven by Harald Welte and
he might be able to talk about the pros and cons of netlink versus a
character device.

I think the main advantages of netlink over a character device is its
flexible format, which is easily extendable, and multicast capability,
which can be used to broadcast events and configuration changes. Its
also good to have all the net stuff accessible in a uniform way.

Also netlink doesn't have the naming issues that /dev node would.

-- 
Stephen Hemminger [off-list ref]
OSDL http://developer.osdl.org/~shemminger