ReplacementNetworking

Summary

Discuss replacing the existing netbase and ifupdown infrastructure used in Ubuntu with something more flexible. The replacement implementation should use as much existing code as possible, and be based on configuration and integration of tools like dhclient and wpasupplicant rather than the re-implementation of them.

Rationale

The existing ifupdown tools are only designed for configuring known interfaces with a single protocol, and this has proved massively inflexible now that Linux is capable of dealing with any number of hot-pluggable interfaces. In particular, newly connected interfaces are left unused rather than a default such as DHCP configuration being tried.

In addition, the status of each interface is simply limited to just "up" and "down" with only one program being run to achieve that. A typical modern WiFi interface might actually have many stages each requiring an additional program to move to the next, e.g. requires basic interface configuration, followed by running wpa_supplicant to associate with an AP, followed by dhclient to obtain an IP address, etc. Each of those stages are discrete and need individual management, retrying on failure or possibly moving on to an alternate stage.

Use cases

Scope

Design

Implementation

Code

Data preservation and migration

Outstanding issues

BoF agenda and discussion

  • Desired design.

  • Network-based configuration (whereami, etc.)

CategorySpec

ReplacementNetworking (last edited 2008-08-06 16:27:47 by localhost)