On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 6:50 AM, Arnd Bergmann [off-list ref] wrote:

I think we also need to ensure the device doesn't go away, which
was one of the reasons for the rcu_read_lock_bh() earlier.

This may be veering far off into the weeds, but I'm wondering if you
considered making macvtap devices behave more like tap devices.
Specifically, the application would open /dev/net/macvtap and send it
an ioctl with the name of the macvtap interface, the name of the lower
interface to attach to, the MAC address, etc; this would cause the
macvtap interface to spring into existence. The macvtap interface
would go away when the application exits or closes the file.

The tricky part here would be noticing when the lower interface goes
away, and (ideally) reattaching when an interface with the same name
reappears.

I think the advantage of this approach is that it better fits the way
applications like qemu and libvirt use tap interfaces. Unlike the
current approach, however, this wouldn't allow creating a macvtap
interface and keep it around independently of the application using
it. Is it desirable to support this use case?

--Ed