[Devel] Re: [PATCH] Virtual ethernet device (v.4)

[Pavel Emelyanov]

Hi, David.

What are your plans about this driver?

Thanks,
Pavel

> Veth stands for Virtual ETHernet. It is a simple tunnel driver
> that works at the link layer and looks like a pair of ethernet
> devices interconnected with each other.
> 
> Mainly it allows to communicate between network namespaces but
> it can be used as is as well. E.g. one may join to bridged
> networking segments together.
> 
> Eric recently sent a similar driver called etun with the sysfs
> interface. This implementation uses another interface - the RTM_NRELINK 
> message introduced by Patric.
> 
> The newlink callback is organized that way to make it easy to create the 
> peer device in the separate namespace when we have them in kernel.
> 
> Many thanks to Patrick for reviewing the patches and his advises
> on how to make driver cleaner.
> 
> Changes from v.3:
> * Reserved place for struct ifinfomsg in IFLA_INFO_DATA part
>   of the packet. This is not used yet, but may be in the
>   future.
> 
> Changes from v.2.1:
> * Made the generic routine for link creation to be used
>   by veth driver, any other tunnel driver that needs to
>   create several devices at once and rtnl_newlink() code.
> 
> Changes from v.2:
> * Rebase over latest netdev tree. No actual changes;
> * Small code rework.
> 
> Changes from v.1:
> * Per-cpu statistics;
> * Standard convention for nla policy names;
> * Module alias added;
> * Xmit function fixes noticed by Patric;
> * Code cleanup.
> 
> The patch for an ip utility is also provided.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Pavel Emelianov <xemul at openvz.org>
> Acked-by: Patrick McHardy <kaber at trash.net>
>