STEP 2, fixing dhclient behaviour with multiple interfaces

[Robert Watson]

On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Daniel C. Sobral wrote:

> > You could add kevents for interface arrival and departure, and
> > add a kqueue to the dhcpd to catch the arrival/departure events,
> > and then just act on them.
> 
> Instead of just adding the stuff to devd? 

Currently, devd is in the business of dealing with attachment and removal
from the hardware management subsystem.  Network subsystem events, such as
"interface has arrived" are semantically different, but "close enough" in
many cases.  In the past, routing sockets have been the means by which
topology-relevant changes are announced to the user processes.  More
recently, kqueue has permitted monitoring of a plethora of event types.  I
think there's a decent argument for a neteventd, perhaps integrated as a
thread into devd, listening on network events rather than device
attach/detach events.  The only real problem is that it would be very nice
if the DHCP client code were available in a library so it could be linked
into a network event manager. 

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org      Network Associates Laboratories