Re: Should VLANs be devices or something else?

Ben Greear (greearb@candelatech.com)
Tue, 19 Jun 2001 16:16:50 -0700

"David S. Miller" wrote:
>
> Dax Kelson writes:
> > On Tue, 19 Jun 2001, Ben Greear wrote:
> > > Should VLANs be devices or some other thing?
> >
> > I would vote that VLANs be devices.
> >
> > Conceptually, VLANs as network devices is a no brainer.
>
> Conceptually, svr4 streams are a beautiful and elegant
> mechanism. :-)
>
> Technical implementation level concerns need to be considered
> as well as "does it look nice".

I found it to be the easiest way to implement things. It allowed
me to not have to touch any of layer 3, and I did not have to patch
any user-space program like ip or ifconfig.

I'm not even sure if the nay-sayers ever had another idea, they
just didn't like having lots of interfaces. Originally, there
were claims of inefficiency, but it seems that other than things
like 'ip' and ifconfig, there are no serious performance problems
I am aware of.

Adding the hashed lookup for devices took the exponential curve out of
ip and ifconfig's performance, btw.

-- 
Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech.com>          <Ben_Greear@excite.com>
President of Candela Technologies Inc      http://www.candelatech.com
ScryMUD:  http://scry.wanfear.com     http://scry.wanfear.com/~greear
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