Re: Status update on 1.0

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Gábor Boskovits <address@hidden> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> ezt írta (időpont: 2019. márc. 13., Sze, 
> 16:21):
>>
>> Hello Guix!
>
>>   • IPv6 support in ‘static-networking-service’: as discussed at the
>>     Guix Days, we’ll probably need to Linux Netlink sockets to do that
>>     rather than the old ioctls currently used in (guix build syscalls).
>>
>>     The netlink interface for network config is vaguely documented at
>>     <https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/networking/generic_netlink_howto>.
>>     Writing bindings for ‘sendmsg’ and the associated data structures
>>     looks reasonable… it just needs to be done.
>>
>
> I am interested in doing this.

Awesome!

> However, there are a few points that needs to be clarified: 1. I came
> to the same conclusion regarding the netlink stuff, but the old ioctl
> cannot be fully dropped. (It still provides funcions that are needed
> to get the netlink working)

Yes, I think we can keep it.

> 2. This might be linux specific. What do we do on other kernels?
> (It might be reasonable to provide the abstractions in a module, and
> from there select an available implementation, or signal an error that
> the functionality is not yet implemented for this system...)
> Wdyt?

For now, we’ll have to ignore the other kernel.

Longer-term, I suppose we should provide an abstraction over network
configuration and have it translated to Netlink messages or Hurd RPCs.

> Also a nice low level binding written in C is available as libmnl:
> https://netfilter.org/projects/libmnl/index.html

Or libnl also.  Though if it’s not too hard, I’d rather have us directly
bind to ‘sendmsg’, ‘struct msghdr’, and so on.

Thanks,
Ludo’.