porting of dladm

[Gibheer]

Hi FreeBSD networker,

for some years now, I'm using FreeBSD coming from OpenSolaris and later
OmniOS. The one thing I'm missing after all this time is the network
handling.

VIMAGE was a big step forward around 2010/2011, but it is still not at
the point where crossbow on Illumos already is.
Also ifconfig was deprecated shortly before the closing of opensolaris.
Yes, the stuff left behind was broken, but I think the idea behind
splitting up ifconfig into separate tools was a very good idea.

After all that time waiting for things to get better in FreeBSD, I want
to help make things better.
For that, the first step I want to do is to port dladm and ipadm to
FreeBSD.

These tools split the hardware configuration from the protocol
configuration, where dladm configures all kind of network devices and
ipadm concentrates on ip configuration.

For people who have never seen dladm, I can recommend the man page

  http://illumos.org/man/1M/dladm

dladm is implemented as a client/server program, where the server runs
in the background and handles the network interface configuration. The
command line client sends messages to the server on what the user wants
it to do.
As I am not that good to decide if that is a good approach or not, I
will start porting it to freebsd and on the way figure out, what might
be good to change to make it work in a better way.

In the long term, I want to use dladm as a platform to get other
features into FreeBSD like the virtual switch or wifi configuration
wihtout the need to install additional tools (maybe we can have
something without wpa_supplicant?).

Is there interest in this project at all or does anyone know if someone
else is working on a similar project?

Thank you,

Gibheer