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Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2003 14:20:50 -0500 (EST)
From: Robert Watson <rwatson@freebsd.org>
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To: Bruce M Simpson <bms@spc.org>
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cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
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cc: Andre Oppermann <andre@freebsd.org>
cc: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: ifconfig(8) refactoring -- YACC grammar now online
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On Sun, 30 Nov 2003, Bruce M Simpson wrote:

> On Sun, Nov 30, 2003 at 01:12:42PM +0100, Andre Oppermann wrote:
> > What I've thinking about a lot is to make the networking system and
> > ifconfig sort of class-based like newbus and geom.
> 
> Look at: http://people.freebsd.org/~bms/dump/nifconfig/nifconfig-design.txt
> 
> There is a pending change to if_gre to enable it to be easily classified
> in this way; ifconfig would simply query the interface for its if_type.
> This is one way to do it without having to change struct ifnet. We could
> add a new field, but avoiding changing the ABI is a Good Thing. 

if_type seems like it will work for high level classes of interfaces, but
something more fine-grained will be required for interfaces that implement
multiple classes or subclasses (i.e., 802 generally, and also 802.11b). 
Or likewise, tap interfaces might implement 802 generally, but also
if_tap-specific primitives.  Do we need to probe by-name for capabilities
using interface ioctls, or return a "list" of implemented
interfaces/classes to allow things to be a bit more multidimensional? 

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert@fledge.watson.org      Senior Research Scientist, McAfee Research