Interface groups (from OpenBSD)

[Brooks Davis]

On Tue, Mar 28, 2006 at 11:31:22AM +0200, Max Laier wrote:
> 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).

Sounds like a reasonable feature.  I think it's orthogional to renaming.

> 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.

Adding a TAILQ to the end of struct ifnet would not be an ABI change in 6
because drivers don't know or care how big struct ifnet is anymore and I
can't think of an implementation where the drive code would need to care.

-- Brooks

-- 
Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
PGP fingerprint 655D 519C 26A7 82E7 2529  9BF0 5D8E 8BE9 F238 1AD4
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-net/attachments/20060328/5c2cbca3/attachment.pgp