RFC: interface description

[Xin LI]

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Hi,

Bjoern A. Zeeb wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Aug 2009, Julian Elischer wrote:
> 
>> Andrey V. Elsukov wrote:
>>> Xin LI wrote:
>>>> While playing with some OpenBSD installation I found that they have an
>>>> interesting feature - adding description to a NIC.  This is useful for
>>>> system administrators to "tag" the interface, also, the ladvd program
>>>> has a feature to use the SIOCSIFDESCR ioctl to document the remote CDP
>>>
>>> Something similar was rejected at least two times :)
>>>
>>> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=kern/83622
>>> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=kern/110720
>>
>> not rejected..
>>
>> suffered from lack of enthusiasm maybe.
> 
> My point has always been - if I have to add/do an ioctl I can always also
> use a library call that will read it from a .txt, .xml, .db file
> or whatever and I don't have to go to the kernel, handle all the
> string length problems there, ... especially as the kernel cannot do
> anything with that string.

I have also received some private e-mail regarding this, and I think
that would be more sensible (better flexibility, and of course, a better
chance that we can MFC it since it won't change kernel ABI).

The only question I have would be, that is it possible to uniquely
identify a NIC without assistance from kernel?  For instance, one can
change an interface from being called "em0" to "eth0" and from "bge0" to
"em0".  It's easy to track this information through ifconfig(8) with a
callback, clean up the file upon restart, but we can not prevent other
programs from calling IOCSIFNAME on the interface.  Any idea for this?

Cheers,
- --
Xin LI <delphij at delphij.net>	http://www.delphij.net/
FreeBSD - The Power to Serve!
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