Network configuration future

[Olaf Kirch]

Hi Adam,

On Thursday 30 August 2012 04:16:23 Adam Williamson wrote:
> > *** Network Manager is just another daemon created for a task
> > which historically often did not need any daemons. It's almost as if
> > the new generation of Unix hackers wants to redo everything -
> > in x10 or x100 times bloated and more complex way than it was done
> > before.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> > One, a modern network management framework should run as a service.
> > The
> > kernel offers a plethora of notifications via rtnetlink, and
> > increasingly
> > expects user space to react to these (for instance in the IPv6 area).
> > Running a network management daemon allows us to track the state,
> > detect
> > changes, and react to them appropriately.
> 
> There appears to be some cognitive dissonance in the document. It seems
> odd to criticize NetworkManager solely for being a bloated, complex
> daemon, and then, having dismissed NM, in describing the ideal
> next-generation network management framework, declare that it ought to
> be a bloated complex daemon...

That dissonance is explained easily. Only the second section you quote was
written by me, the other is a comment from Denis Vlasenko, actually :-)

And no, I'm not criticizing NetworkManager for being bloated. My main
criticism of NetworkManager is that it's very much focused on managing
desktop machines, and it's not flexible and extensible enough to make it
handle server scenarios, much less vhost setups. It is also hard to make it
coexist peacefully with other network management on the system - if you
start NetworkManager, it tends to take possession of all interfaces
it finds (and understands).

And no, I'm not advocating a bloated daemon either. Network management
has to fit into initrd and possibly small-footprint images. Currently,
wickedd, its library and the dhcp4/dhcp6 helpers fit into a little over
1 MB.

By contrast, the ISC dhlient comes in at 1.6MB on my system already.

Regards,
Olaf
-- 
Neo didn't bring down the Matrix. SOA did. (soafacts.com)
--------------------------------------------
Olaf Kirch - Director SUSE Linux Enterprise; R&D (okir at suse.com)
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany
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