Re: Thinking about "branes" for netbsd...

[Dennis Ferguson <dennis.c.ferguson%gmail.com@localhost>]

On 2 May, 2012, at 14:49 , Mouse wrote:
>> After spending some time thinking about what would be required to
>> implement branes as part of the SMP networking project, [...]
> 
> What's a brane in this context?  The only meaning I'm familiar with for
> the term is from particle physics and makes no sense here.  I did a
> little searching, and, while my Web-fu is admittedly weak, I didn't
> find anything the least bit helpful.

I think I've only seen the term used here.  It seems to refer to
a multiple routing table, or routing instance, mechanism, which I
understand, but appears to be laden with additional, implied policy
semantics concerning the use of the mechanism, which I don't quite
understand.  The term "VRF" is used by router vendors for essentially
the identical mechanism (i.e. more than one routing table), but that
term is loaded with what seem to be an entirely different set of policy
assumptions concerning what the mechanism will be used for, assumptions
also different from, say, NAT, which is another router thing which is
usefully (but not necessarily) structured around a multiple routing
instances.

Assuming this is correct, I'll admit that I much prefer thinking about
the bare underlying mechanism and its associated configuration, trying to
make the latter rich enough that a user can configure his own way to
whatever policy he would like to use the mechanism to implement without
strong a priori assumptions about what that policy will be.  I stumble over
the "processes get chroot'd into branes" thing that always seems to arise
in conversations about branes since, for most of the applications of
multiple routing instances that I understand, this is not very useful.

Dennis Ferguson