If you issue a /etc/rc.d/network restart with present xvif(4) and "auto_ifconfig" enabled, the rc.d/network will look for ifconfig_xvifXXX variables [1] . Given the eval line, it won't get the correct variable due to sh POSIX conventions for shell variables.but why would there be a ifconfig_xvifXXX variable anyway ? as these names are more or less random anyway, it wouldn't make sense to have these in rc.conf ...
True. But the problem does not lie here. When performing the eval [1], instead of returning an empty string, it will set the args variable to ".0" (or "-0"). args being non empty, it will attempt an "ifconfig .0 down"... which will return an error.
See Taylor's PR misc/39376 for details. [1] http://nxr.netbsd.org/xref/src/etc/rc.d/network#448 [2] http://nxr.netbsd.org/xref/src/etc/rc.d/network#454 -- Jean-Yves Migeon jeanyves.migeon%free.fr@localhost