Re: Making NM portable

[David Cantrell <dcantrell redhat com>]

On Sep 26, 2008, at 5:17 AM, Dan Williams wrote:

> On Fri, 2008-09-26 at 10:22 +0530, Debarshi Ray wrote:
> > > > I'd actually rather just link to libnl on Linux and libroute on  
> > > > *BSD I
> > > > think, abstracting the two inside NM.  Because unless you want to
> > > > basically copy the functionality of libnl into libroute (which  
> > > > might
> > > > take a while) it's probably easier to just abstract it in NM.
> >
> > > Going to agree with Dan here.  Not really a need to make libroute  
> > > do what
> > > libnl does... we already have libnl.  We can create the necessary
> > > abstractions inside NetworkManager so we can work with either  
> > > libnl or
> > > libroute.
> >
> > Looking at it from the Inetutils aspect, there is a plan to implement
> > a portable 'route' using 'libroute', so if 'libroute' has support for
> > various kernels (including Linux), it makes it easy to write 'route'
> > as a client program using 'libroute'. Since I am trying to keep the
> > same interface for adding, deleting, showing, etc. across different
> > backends it would become really easy to write portable client
> > applications.
>
> Yeah, but NM uses libnl for all address operations too.  So unless
> libroute adds addressing abstractions, NM will still use libnl code
> internally.


libnl exposes the kernel Netlink API to us in userspace.  Address  
operations and routing table manipulation are a tiny subset of what it  
can do.  We can also work with interfaces directly and modify  
settings, such as the MTU.

If you want routing functionality for Linux in libroute, I'd say just  
have libroute link with libnl.  All of the hard work is done for you.   
Then we can use libnl and libroute in NM and gain FreeBSD support and  
still have all of the Linux support we need/want.

--
David Cantrell <dcantrell redhat com>
Red Hat / Honolulu, HI