From: Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 02:01:06 -0500
Why must that affect SIOCGIFFLAGS reporting?
Because it is asking for a boolean and we don't have
a boolean to give to it.
Like I said, apps should ask for the count because that
is what it is, a count.
it broke a security program that called that ioctl to check for unwanted
promisc users
A program which should also be fixed to ask for the count.
I know what you want, you want IFF_PROMISC to be
(dev->promisc_count != 0), but I'm not going to publish
that from SIOCGIFFLAGS for several reasons:
1) It has lousy semantics, in short it's stupid.
2) If I fix change this behavior today, people will
still need to ask explicitly for the count to handle
any kernel before 2.4.19preX/2.2.2X-preX/2.5.5-preX
So be realistic, there is nothing to gain by the change
you propose.
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