[crossbow-discuss] Crossbow Man pages (Draft)

[James Carlson]

Sunay Tripathi writes:
> So we probably need some changes to explicitly control the user
> assigned mac address in an empty slot. Some of the possible
> semantics can be separation of creation/destruction of the VNIC
> from the assigning a mac address to the empty slot. This would allow
> user to explicitly fill the slots and then build/destroy VNICs
> on top of that.
> 
> Alternatively we can go down the path of tying a VNIC to a randomly generated
> MAC address for the life of the VNIC only. If there is an empty
> slot, then the mac address goes there (and we show it as user generated
> or random when asked to display all slots) but as soon as VNIC is
> destroyed, the associated mac address also disappears from the slot.
> 
> Dave/Jim, any opinion on this?

If I understand what you're suggesting for that alternative, even
factory-supplied addresses could be destroyed when tearing down a
VNIC.  That doesn't quite sound right to me.

Other than that, I think the models that sound easier to administer
are the ones where the MAC address "slots" stay stable as visible
objects.  Whether VNICs themselves are assigned to slots, built on top
of them, or are identically the same objects as "slots" (and thus
always available), I'm not sure it matters a great deal.

It probably just needs to be simple.  The split of traditional BSD
ifconfig into Solaris-style IP-only ifconfig plus dladm for the rest
is a substantial complication of the administrative model.  Adding
more layers wouldn't, I think, be a good thing.

-- 
James Carlson, KISS Network                    <james.d.carlson at sun.com>
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