[ovs-dev] [PATCH 04/13] vswitch: Remove redundant "internal" column from Interface table.

[Ben Pfaff]

On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 05:03:39PM -0500, Jesse Gross wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 1:18 PM, Ben Pfaff <blp at nicira.com> wrote:
> 
> > This column's function is now served by the "type" column, which is set
> > to "internal" to mark an interface as internal.
> >
> 
>  I think that this is going to confuse the netdev library, since it is still
> going to try to open internal devices, which it can't because there is no
> netdev provider called "internal".  I suppose that we could implicitly
> convert "internal" to "system".  That would certainly work for what we have
> now.  I'm not sure that the concept of synthesizing arbitrary fake ports
> make sense in other situations anyways (i.e. a hardware datapath).
> 
> Of course the problem exists independently of this commit since we are
> already using the type column for internal ports.

I wonder whether we could actually create a netdev provider named
"internal" and make it do the right thing?  (I haven't thought about
this though, maybe there's some reason it can't work.)