From owner-freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Jun 23 00:05:12 2007 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-net@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-net@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [69.147.83.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1A43C16A41F; Sat, 23 Jun 2007 00:05:12 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from bms@icir.org) Received: from out4.smtp.messagingengine.com (out4.smtp.messagingengine.com [66.111.4.28]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5935713C45D; Sat, 23 Jun 2007 00:02:13 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from bms@icir.org) Received: from compute2.internal (compute2.internal [10.202.2.42]) by out1.messagingengine.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5885617BF; Fri, 22 Jun 2007 19:44:46 -0400 (EDT) Received: from heartbeat1.messagingengine.com ([10.202.2.160]) by compute2.internal (MEProxy); Fri, 22 Jun 2007 19:44:47 -0400 X-Sasl-enc: r8T9Fv4098do9jMd3q1F9q2PgoFZOXBkoeEbTUBG8B1I 1182555905 Received: from [192.168.123.18] (82-35-112-254.cable.ubr07.dals.blueyonder.co.uk [82.35.112.254]) by mail.messagingengine.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 019CE3BB9; Fri, 22 Jun 2007 19:45:04 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <467C5EEC.1000208@icir.org> Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2007 00:44:44 +0100 From: "Bruce M. Simpson" User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.10 (X11/20070407) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Julian Elischer References: <467C1E3C.1020203@elischer.org> In-Reply-To: <467C1E3C.1020203@elischer.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: FreeBSD Net , Marko Zec , releng@freebsd.org, ambrisko@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Vimage virtual networking and 7.0 X-BeenThere: freebsd-net@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Networking and TCP/IP with FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2007 00:05:12 -0000 Julian Elischer wrote: > > In the future I am hoping to be able to use vimage in our products. > They are based at the moment on 6.1, but I can see in a year they will > be based on 7.x. > > Patches for 7.0 and vimage are currently available in perforce. > What I would like to see is if there are any parts of that patch that > would allow us to make adding of vimage to 7.1 an easier task. > > For example, Anything that would prevent vimage from > needing an API change that would prevent it from being added later. My concern is that this may have already happened. I've been trying to do my bit as the years edge on to clean up the networking stack and fix bugs. One of my concerns is that the vimage change, which attempts to take network stack globals and wrap them into one big structure, may intrude on this or be subject to bitrot due to other development. > > I am quite disappointed that despite Marko's best efforts, we miss the > 7.0 > release but if it can be made nonintrusive enough I'd really like to > see if it can get in 7.1. > I appreciate all the hard work Marko has done on this, though I wonder if even 7.1 is ambitious. > Personally, if I were "god" I'd put it in now because it can be > compiled out. > and it wouldn't be compiled by default.Maybe only just bits of it.. > for sure I want the ability to have many routing tables. > and I'm not thrilled about the requirement to have my own patch sets > for this and thus not allowing others to use this feature. I think there are deeper issues in the network stack overall which need to be addressed, such as our lack of support for multipathing, scoped addresses, and all the tidyups which need to happen in struct ifnet to deal with this. My concern is that vimage may be a very intrusive change indeed where these matters are concerned, unless the vimage patches are being kept up-to-date and regression tested as issues are resolved and new features added. BMS