svn commit: r257696 - in head: libexec/rbootd share/man/man9 sys/compat/svr4 sys/net sys/sys

[Gleb Smirnoff]

  John,

On Tue, Nov 05, 2013 at 02:47:52PM -0500, John Baldwin wrote:
J> On Tuesday, November 05, 2013 2:29:04 pm Gleb Smirnoff wrote:
J> > On Tue, Nov 05, 2013 at 11:56:09AM -0500, John Baldwin wrote:
J> > J> On Tuesday, November 05, 2013 5:29:48 am Gleb Smirnoff wrote:
J> > J> > Author: glebius
J> > J> > Date: Tue Nov  5 10:29:47 2013
J> > J> > New Revision: 257696
J> > J> > URL: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/257696
J> > J> > 
J> > J> > Log:
J> > J> >   Drop support for historic ioctls and also undefine them, so that code
J> > J> >   that checks their presence via ifdef, won't use them.
J> > J> 
J> > J> Most of these are COMPAT_43, but one appears to be a 9.x ioctl?  If that's the
J> > J> case it's implementation should probably stick around under appropriate
J> > J> COMPAT_FREEBSD<x> macros.  It looks like it goes all the way back to 4.4BSD,
J> > J> so at least COMPAT_FREEBSD4 and later should define the implementation to
J> > J> preserve ABI compat for old binaries.
J> > 
J> > Why should we support such broken configurations as running new kernel and
J> > ancient core base system utilities? The efforts to keep this are much more
J> > expensive, then yields.
J> 
J> Is this ioctl only ever used by ifconfig and not suitable for public consumption?
J> If so, then I think removing it is fine.  However, it's not clear that this is
J> the case from the commit, and it's good to make sure it is really the case.
J> 
J> It might be nice to hide ioctls we think are internal under some #ifdef that tools
J> like ifconfig #define to expose them so we are more explicit about which ioctls
J> are purely internal, etc.

Well, it isn't hidden and actually some applications as zebra/quagga can use it.

On previous hacking session at this area, 2 years ago, I noticed that zebra/quagga
do use SIOCAIFADDR and it actually does better at filling sockaddrs than our
ifconfig :)

I am pretty sure that no closed source, but available to wide public, application
that configures addresses in FreeBSD kernel exist.

In case of open source applications, like zebra/quagga, supporting one major
release behind should be enough.

-- 
Totus tuus, Glebius.