Using ifconfig(8) to configure netgraph interfaces

[Brooks Davis]

On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 08:06:44AM +0000, Dima Dorfman wrote:
> What are people's thoughts on extending ifconfig(8) to configure
> netgraph-based interfaces, such as ng_fec(4)? The recent trend has
> been to allow all kinds of different network interfaces to be
> configured uniformly through ifconfig. Is there any reason
> functionality based on netgraph nodes should be excluded?

The netgraph configuration processes differs significantly enought that
it would seem like you'd have to a lot of special cases for it.  For
instance the create option would have to grow a lot of specificic
knowledge about the nodes that must be created via netgraph and how to
create them.  Thus far, ifconfig functions have been pretty generic in
implementation except when they are specific a partifular interface
(e.g. if_bridge) or class of interfaces (e.g. wireless interfaces).

> On a related note, is there any reason to not to use netgraph to
> implement things like FEC for production use? Are there any advantages
> to using a normal pseudo device (like NetBSD's agr(4)) instead of
> improving the netgraph node? Performance concerns, anything like that?

ng_fec isn't really much of a netgraph node.  It uses netgraph for
configuration, but actually directly hijacks the interface's input
functions rather than using the netgraph interfaces.  I'd personally
prefer to see it replaced with a pseudo interface that was a bit better
integrated into the overall system

-- Brooks

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