Bryan Kadzban wrote:

(Now, if open() would return effectively a netlink socket bound to
that ifindex already, such that the program didn't need to fill in
the various ifindex fields for e.g. rtnetlink... but it's probably
really hard to do that, so this isn't a serious suggestion.)

Wait, scratch that.  It's not "really hard", it's "almost impossible".

At open() time, you have no idea which netlink family the program wants
to communicate with.  bind() is also hard.  (In theory, you could
support bind() on this new FD -- but then why is userspace using a file
in the first place, and not a socket?)

So this is even less of a serious suggestion now.

I'd still like to be able to refer to NICs by multiple names though, if
we can find a way that works...