Interface groups (from OpenBSD)

[Max Laier]

Hi,

while porting OpenBSD 3.9 (soon to be released) pf I stumbled on interface 
groups.  This is a mechanism to group arbitrary interfaces into logical 
groups.  It is just naming (not functional change), but it helps to convey 
semantic information (e.g. group "LAN", "DMZ" ...) about your interface to 
supporting applications.  This way you can write a policies for interface 
group "LAN" and have it applied to all the VLAN interfaces that come and go.  
Administration is done via ifconfig.  We currently have "ifconfig name" which 
does part of the job.

My question: Does that sound like something interesting for us and should I go 
for importing it into FreeBSD proper, or is it not at all interesting and we 
don't want it (in which case I'd hack something up for pf).

Technical reasoning:  A proper import would add an additional TAILQ link into 
struct ifnet (which is a great deal of ABI change and causes the usual 
headaches).  The hack would use a single void *, but we'd have to pay for the 
additional indirection.  Also yet another config tool would be required to 
administer the interface <-> group binding.

-- 
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\ /  Max Laier                          | ICQ #67774661
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