Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 21:18:38 -0700 (PDT) From: Robert Clark <res03db2@gte.net> To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Ideas about network interfaces. Message-ID: <200009280418.VAA01234@gte.net>
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A few ideas that've been in the back of my head. Would it make sense to have network device names abstracted one layer more? In other words, would it make it easier for new users, if all network drivers were mapped to something like et0? This might remove some of the need for rewriting rc.firewall on a newly isntalled system. With a symbolic name for interfaces, there could one that defaulted to deny everything. Being able to partition one FreeBSD system into multiple virtual routers would be a nice cabability as well. I wonder if that sort of thing would be possible, without totally gutting the network stack. I've heard of "capabilities" being brought over into FreeBSD. Would this eventually lead to a version of FreeBSD that knows even more about running processes? I hoping that eventually, FreeBSD will be able to "fink" on bad processes. I've often wondered that relying on a sysadmin to figure out which process went south is less than optimal. Sorry, that sentence didn't come out right. At the moment, the BSDs are the bright spot in the OS universe. I have more hope that good things will come from them. UNIX continues to mature, but for all its glory, it has its rough spots too. An analogy, a weak one, would be ethernet. Ethernet has dominated the market. Its everywhere. But I'd argue that one of its biggest weaknesses is that it knows nothing of itself. When ethernet is overutilised, it just stops being optimal. Without a person figuring out what is going on, it just keeps bein suboptimal. ATM on the other hand, (if I understand it correctly), is aware of its limits. It hopefully would not allow itself to be oversubscribed. It either has the capacity to handle your traffic, or it does not. But either way it will tell you so. Or look at file systems. Why is any part of a disk ever allowd to be empty? It costs the same to keep them running, whether they're empty or full. Or look at interprocess signals. Why don't we have a standardized signal for "please store state, and shut down cleanly"? Or one for "please reload state, and return to service"? Thank you for taking the time to read these questions, and thank you for a forum to ask these kinds of questions. [RC] To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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