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Date:      Thu, 29 Nov 2001 19:54:58 EST
From:      A180009977889@aol.com
To:        hackers@freebsd.org
Cc:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   re: netgraph
Message-ID:  <23.1547b480.293832e2@aol.com>

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> The concept that "netgraph hooks" are a "leg up" on say, ETs drivers that 
> have integrated bandwidth management and prioritization, WAN bridging 
> support, load balancing and a probably 25% performance advantage is a bit 
> entertaining. Unless you need to do some convoluted encapsulation netgraph 
> is, aside from being appallingly non-standard to anything else in the 
market, 
>  not much of an "advantage", and its a poster child for the trade off of 
> "flexibility" versus performance.

J. Elschier wrote...

>Netgraph is a prototyping tool, which has enough performance to be useful
>in non-performance-critical applications. (such as all sync interfaces).
>It is not designed for gigabit interfaces etc.

Im sure the guy with 900 DLCIs on his T3 would not agree that performance is 
:not an issue" on sync interfaces.. Performance is always an issue, except 
maybe with tcpdump. This short-sightedness is just what Im referring to. 

Making netgraph a plug-in option is fine and desireable. Touting it as "the 
way" to do things is damaging to the OS in general,particuarly when you are 
not willing to accept alternatives provided by commercial vendors.

The best solution is to provide "options" to users. You adulterate the OS by 
trying to make it do everything, when its very easy to provide clean hooks so 
that different solutions can be seamlessly used depending on what is best for 
a particular application. if_ethersubr.c is beginning to look like an 
abortion, when one or two simple pre and post processing hooks would allow 
for both open-source and commercial solutions, to be used at the users 
discretion.

Its a matter of thinking about it and coming up with something that makes 
sense, rather that the "I have something that works so lets stuff it into the 
OS".

just my opinion.



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