Re: [PATCH 0/3] net: add device groups

On Mon, 2011-01-10 at 14:41 +0100, Johannes Berg wrote:

Can you explain the purpose of this? I'm wondering if it would make
sense to automatically group all virtual interfaces belonging to a
single 802.11 device, for instance.

It depends what you want to do with that grouping.
In a nutshell, this greatly reduces the amount of kernel-user netlink
traffic in presence of multi interfaces.
you can do things like:
 
ip link set dev ppp0 group 1
...
...
ip link set dev pppN group 1

ip link ls group 1
ip link set down group 1
ip link set mtu 512 group 1
etc

Although now that i am thinking of it,
I am not sure whether it would be a legit thing to change
the MAC address of a group of devices - we may need to put
some restrictions.

Note: this grouping thing can also be potentially used in
packet policies etc (but i dont want to distract the simple
requirement we have at the moment).

cheers,
jamal