Re: Specifying names for tap interfaces

[Darren Reed <darrenr%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On 19/06/2012 1:51 AM, Greg Troxel wrote:
> 
>   Anything that we can control, like tap-%domid.%devid would be good
>   though. It doesn't have to follow any specific nomenclature, but it
>   will be good to be able to specify two integers, one that corresponds
>   to the domain id, and another one that identifies the specific network
>   card inside that domain.
> 
> So there's no need to change the /dev/tapN, or the device number, but
> just the name of the interface.   As far as I know that's just a string
> in the struct ifnet, and it's compared when one searches by name, so it
> should be changeable.  I had thought setting the interface name would
> change more and be more intrusive, but maybe it's not so bad.
> (It does make sense to require it to start with 'tap' to avoid
> collisions.)
> 
> It seems easy enough to add the ioctl and see if things blow up...

This should be done differently.

Rather than just change the name of the interface, create a layer
that maps a real device name to a network interface name.

Otherwise if you rename "tap0" to "bge3", how do you easily
determine that "bge3" is actually a tap device and not a bge?

Darren