CARP as a module; followup thoughts

Bruce Simpson bms at incunabulum.net
Wed Apr 22 10:08:15 UTC 2009


Will Andrews wrote:
> I'm sure most of this sounds like rambling from a crazed lunatic or
> something, but I'm also sure most who understand my patch agree that
> it isn't the nicest of ways to make it possible to load carp (or any
> other protocol) as a module.
>   

Not at all. It is a mess to be sure.

One of the criticisms of Netgraph is that it is poorly understood 
outside of its immediate developer community. The BSD networking stack 
has a number of textbooks written for it, Netgraph does not, and it 
probably factored into the decision of Itronix to sponsor a from-scratch 
implementation of Bluetooth for NetBSD -- netgraph has been considered 
'a bridge too far', to score a cheesy pun. It has also been criticised 
for performance, although I am not in a position to judge either way at 
the moment, I simply don't have all the information to hand, and am busy 
doing other things often.

I don't have time to look at your patch right now, unfortunately, but 
can try to make time when less pressed.

When I last looked at the CARP hooks, during the ether_input() cleanup, 
all that was really missing was the ability to register soft MAC 
addresses in the perfect hash filter entries other than the one 
programmed into the card (or configured via ifconfig(8) mechanisms).

cheers
BMS


More information about the freebsd-net mailing list