Patrick McHardy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > It should create as many devices as necessary to operate (similar > to the loopback device) by default. Optional interfaces that are > used for addressing reasons should be manually added by the user > as needed. And it should not use module parameters for that please.
I have now changed vcan to use the netlink interface. I am now thinking about how many interfaces should be created at module load time. The PF_CAN doesn't need vcan to operate, like lo for IP. vcan is mostly for doing tests when you don't have real CAN interfaces available, and you would normally want to have as many vcan devices as you would have real CAN interface on your target hardware. This is why I also wanted to have a default of 0 vcan interfaces and an ioctl do add interfaces as needed. Then we decided however to have a module parameter with a typical default and no ioctl(). Now, I would again think that 0 vcan interfaces should be created automatically and the user must create the devices he needs. Wouldn't that also be a better default for dummy interfaces? It would simplify dummy.c quite a bit, since dummy_init_one() could be removed completely and dummy_init_module() would only register the dummy_link_ops, right? However, this could surprise a user loading the module and not seeing any new interface. Is it because of backward compatibility that you create one dummy interface by default? For this reason I also consider a default of one vcan interface to be created automatically. But then 1 seems almost as arbitrarily as 4, since also 1 is not needed for PF_CAN to work. I currently still prefer no default interfaces, since we would get rid of some code. What is the reason you don't like a module parameter to control the number of default interfaces? We still have that in our code currently (but I'm about to remove it). urs - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
