Re: Allocating AF constants for vendors.

On Wednesday 22 August 2007, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
I trimmed the sender of this because I got it in private mail, that
said I thought it was a good bunch of questions so I am replying
to it.

64? are you intending to bump AF_MAX or allocate them sequentially
such that adding another AF will require AF_MAX to grow a lot?

In general this seems like a bad idea to me. I suggest you need to
(publicly) explain what you are doing and why this is a good idea.

The goal here is to allow vendors to add their own constants without
worrying about conflicting with FreeBSD constants. It will allow
vendors to maintain some semblance of binary compatibility against
FreeBSD.

If you look at libpcap:

http://cvs.tcpdump.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/libpcap/pcap/bpf.h?rev=1.15

You can see that Juniper has asked for some number of reserved
"families", in our case, I think it would be a bit greedy to
grow the list _just_ for Juniper, so I suggested something that
would work for every vendor.

As far as implementation details, either one works for me, do you
have any particular preference?

Other than the actual delta, will this have any noticeable negative
impact that you can see?

DLTs are something very different to address families. DLTs are cheap as
they are simply a number that is passed around. In contrast to that,
there are some AF_MAX sized arrays in the kernel (e.g. if_afdata[] in
struct ifnet or the routing tables) these will grow if you change
AF_MAX - that's a bad thing!

Could you provide a patch with what you have in mind so I (and other
similarly confused people) can understand what you have in mind.

Extending AF_MAX by 64 is out of the question, IMHO.

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