Re: Interface groups (from OpenBSD)

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

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