Andrey Savochkin wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I want to ad my $0.02.
>
> On Sat, Jun 03, 2000 at 09:18:18AM -0700, Mitchell Blank Jr wrote:
> > > Devices map to physical devices i.e ports in your lingo. How many of those
> > > do you see in your average Linux machine?
> >
> > The problem is that if you only think about the "common" network types
> > (ethernet, PPP, etc) this line gets blurred, since there's a one-to-one
> > corresponance between:
> > * physical devices
> > * network devices (i.e. things that you can bind IP addresses to,
> > netfilter based on, tcpdump of)
> >
> > Any sane implementation of VLANs needs to be a network device in the
> > second sense.
>
> Network devices in the second sense is only an abstraction.
> Linux kernel do not bind IP addresses for devices. IP address assignment to
> any device is just an entry in routing table "local". The kernel keeps
> information about the correspondence about IP address and device only for
> backward compatibility to help ifconfig and other obsolete network management
> software to work. I'm very thankful to Alexey for removing finally the
> long-standing mistake of correspondence between IP addresses and devices from
> the kernel.
>
> Netfilters isn't a big problem, too. A specific VLAN-id matching netfilter
> module is a clean and powerful solution.
>
> I think that the current VLAN implementation slightly abuses the notion of
> device. And it doesn't relate to the number of devices and the efficiency of
> search algorithms. The current VLAN implementation is a pure packet-mangling
> code. It misses one of the most important properties of network devices -
> flow control. Any code that doesn't provide flow control isn't a device, but
> a
> code just manipulating of packet contents.
>
> The current kernel infrastructure for packet mangling may still need some
> adjustments, but it at least exists. I'm encouraging to consider VLAN
> implementation as just a netfilter module.
>
> Best regards
> Andrey V.
> Savochkin
As Mitchell said, will I be able to run OSPF between VLANs? I actually
run zebra ospfd on vlans. Zebra has a strong notion of device. It relies
on device up, device done, change ip and other messages from netlink.
Will I be able to do that if vlan will be implemented not as a device.
It looks like vlan will be useless without device interface, at least
for me.
--
Gleb.
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