Re: Making NM portable

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Sat, 2008-09-06 at 01:16 +0530, Debarshi Ray wrote:
> I was going through the NM code and found that the implementation is
> tied to the Linux kernel. I also noticed that FreeBSD people want to
> make it work with the FreeBSD kernel.
> 
> Recently I was hacking on a 'route' implementation that works across
> multiple kernels and is as much feature complete as posible. The idea
> is to have a library do the hard work using PF_NETLINK for the Linux
> kernel and PF_ROUTE for the *BSD kernels.
> 
> Can I do something to help NM use such a library instead of directly
> invoking ip(8) from iproute2?

Portability to *BSD is a worthy goal; most of the dependencies are
cross-platform already or are D-Bus services.  The stuff that's
currently Linux-specific is random bits to get info from the wireless
card (which could be replaced by enhancing the wpa_supplicant dbus
interface) and the routing and addressing stuff (which is pretty well
encapsulated in libnl already and could be separated out in NM itself).
It would be interesting to try a quick port and see just how much needs
to be changed and then start figuring out how best to break up the code
in SVN to help that effort.  Care to take a stab? :)

Dan