On Aug 27, 2014, at 5:59 PM, Bruce Dubbs wrote:
My preference is to leave things as they are. I don't see much advantage to dropping bridge-utils. It's a very fast build (2 seconds in my log) and provides a pretty clear manpage. What we have works, and the changes needed would be fairly invasive.
I agree at some points. There are many times it is good to leave it alone, especially if a bit of work is required with little benefit.
Just as ifconfig is deprecated, bridge utils may be deprecrated, as well, as it uses ioctl, which is to be avoided. The netlink socket interface is the proper way to manage the links. Since there are still hurdles in switching from old ioctl based tools to the netlink based tools, bridge-utils isn't that critical to wipe away, yet. It is best to know that iproute2 should be the preferred utility to configure the netlink interfaces.
For those interested in dropping bridge-utils and wanting to use iproute2 (which is advised), viewing the git log of net/bridge/ br_netlink.c in a kernel tree will shed light on the introduction of using netlink for managing bridges and the future features which will be ignored when using ioctl based bridge-utils.
Sincerely, William Harrington -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
