After searching through the kernel sources and a fair amount of mailing lists looking for insight on the problem of writing protocol independant network apps in kernel space and coming up empty handed, I am hoping that linux-net would be the appropiate place to ask this question. (apologies in advance if I am incorrect). Is there a preferred way to do this along the lines of POSIX 1g's getaddrinfo/getnameinfo that currently resides in glibc? You many be saying to yourself why should such an little used and obviously userspace application orietented set of functions be implemented in the kernel? Should not something as frivolus as writing an protocol independant app actually be part of the program itself?! I can think of a couple good reasons why these assumptions are incorrect. The immediate being the slow but unavoidable migration of certain network apps moving into kernel space (khttpd and the like comes to mind), and getaddrinfo is without a doubt the preferred and least painful way of making these kernel-space network applications IPv4/IPv6 independant. Another would be the simple fact that getaddrinfo and its friends are fairly simple to implement, and would require at most a few hundred lines of code. If the consenuses view is infact this would be an adventagous thing then I would like to step up to write the implemenation, if not then please suggest a better way or at least agree that this is indeed a problem that needs addressing. Comments and suggestions? Nick Bellinger (usual "please CC me because im not on the list" goes here) - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-net" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
