1. The netinfo module provides a collection of net_* functions in the kernel, some of which provide indentical functionality to ioctls and while using said ioctls has not been possible from inside the kernel in the past, the kernel sockets project will change that.
2. When using ioctls for such things as gathering the address assigned to a network interface, it is necessary to use the lifreq structure. To the best of my knowledge, lifreq is an unstable interface, despite being documented in if(7p). 3. There is a need for the function calls *and* the data structures used here to be stable, so that there is no risk from a patch breaking them. 4. I'm not sure if someone who's using netinfo should also need to open a socket for the purpose of getting interface addresses, etc. It is tempting to add some sort of netinfo interface to the ioctl stuff that uses a kernel socket underneath but has a stable API up on top. Thoughts? Darren _______________________________________________ networking-discuss mailing list [email protected]
