From owner-freebsd-net Mon Sep 16 9:44:54 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-net@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.FreeBSD.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id ACA6637B400 for ; Mon, 16 Sep 2002 09:44:53 -0700 (PDT) Received: from insomnia.spc.org (insomnia.spc.org [195.224.94.183]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 4148943E9C for ; Mon, 16 Sep 2002 09:44:52 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from bms@insomnia.spc.org) Received: (qmail 1916 invoked by uid 1031); 16 Sep 2002 16:42:06 -0000 Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2002 17:42:06 +0100 From: Bruce M Simpson To: freebsd-net@freebsd.org Subject: Proposal: adopt SIOCGLIFNUM interface for enumerating iflist. Message-ID: <20020916164206.GN28076@spc.org> Mail-Followup-To: Bruce M Simpson , freebsd-net@freebsd.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.28i Sender: owner-freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org All, I propose we adopt the SIOCGLIFNUM interface from Solaris 8 for enumerating the list of configured interfaces on a system. Many userland applications now traverse the interface list to gather interface information, in particular those which make use of multicast IP, or for example, those which search for configured wireless interfaces on a system. At this time these applications have to play 'elastic buffer' games with the SIOCGIFCONF ioctl in order to get all of the relevant information. By allowing userland applications to determine the size of this buffer at runtime, we eliminate the need for repeated calls to ifioctl(). I'd like to know everyone's thoughts on the matter... BMS To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-net" in the body of the message