Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 9 Jul 2008 22:34:29 -0400 | From | Bill Nottingham <> | Subject | Re: [RFC PATCH 0/2] Allow full bridge configuration via sysfs |
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David Miller (davem@davemloft.net) said: > > Why, if netlink is the standard (and it's been around for a long > > damn time), was sysfs configuration for bonding added in 2005? Why > > was bridge configuration added in 2005, and *extended* in 2006 and > > 2007? Why were the user-space tools such as brctl ported from ioctl > > to sysfs? > > Because often a lot of shit slips in when someone who understands > the ramifications is too busy or on vacation.
Duly noted, will time all patch submissions to land during your vacations in the future.
More seriously, if there's not a mechanism to prevent ABIs the kernel doesn't want like this being added, that's a problem.
> We do want everything to be netlink based. > > Why? > > Because it means that you can run one monitoring tool to listen > for netlink events and report them to the user for diagnosis. > > It means that network configuration events can be sent over > the wire and used remotely at some point. > > The latter can never happen as long as we keep adding ad-hoc > config stuff.
Sure, but it does make them more opaque to the normal user, leaving them wrapped in the same old ip/brctl/ifenslave/vconfig tools - for better or worse, people like the discoverability and obviousness of sysfs.
Bill
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