On Thu, 2006-08-17 at 10:47 -0400, Peter Memishian wrote: > > I think that should change. Maybe not as part of UV, but eventually I > > can see pressure to change it. > > I don't think it can be changed without breaking lots of DLPI consumers > that have worked for decades. This is the same reason why we require DLPI > link names to end in a digit.
Embedding non-7bit-ascii characters in the interface name might technically work by accident without altering any of the software. After all, you can stuff anything you want in a "char *", and as long as strcmp and printf do the right thing, the software is none the wiser about what octects are contained therein. I don't think dladm will have any means of preventing me from stuffing a '??' in one of the link names I pass it. It is certainly not going to go byte by byte making sure that all of the 8th bits are clear in every string. This means very little, however, as regardless of what happens to accidentally work, we probably can't document anything like this without dedicating resources to investigate the implications on other software that handle interface names (including standard APIs). -Seb
