[Devel] Re: [PATCH][NETNS] Make ifindex generation per-namespace

[David Miller]

From: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul at openvz.org>
Date: Tue, 09 Oct 2007 16:19:25 +0400

> Currently indexes for netdevices come sequentially one by
> one, and the same stays true even for devices that are 
> created for namespaces.
> 
> Side effects of this are:
>  * lo device has not 1 index in a namespace. This may break
>    some userspace that relies on it (and AFAIR something
>    really broke in OpenVZ VEs without this);
>  * after some time namespaces will have devices with indexes
>    like 1000000 os similar. This might be confusing for a
>    human (tools will not mind).
> 
> So move the (currently "global" and static) ifindex variable
> on the struct net, making the indexes allocation look more
> like on a standalone machine.
> 
> Moreover - when we have indexes intersect between namespaces,
> we may catch more BUGs in the future related to "wrong device 
> was found for a given index".
> 
> Signed-off-by: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul at openvz.org>

Based upon Eric's and other's comments, I'm holding off on
this for now.