David Miller wrote:

From: Jay Vosburgh <redacted>
Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:55:58 -0700

quoted

I'm reluctant to mess with this behavior without knowing why it
works this way; there may be a good reason for it that I'm not aware
of.

To be honest I think it's just that this is one huge dark
corner of behavior for many virtual devices, rather than
any of it being intentional.

Indeed. In case of VLANs it has always been this way and I'm
reluctant to change the default behaviour since people might
be relying on this to flush their routes or something similar.

For new drivers I'd say they should always use operstate. For
VLAN the safest way would be to add a flag to disable this
behaviour.