[ovs-dev] [PATCH] Rename "xs-vif-mac" external_ids key to "peer-mac", for generality.

[Jesse Gross]

On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 3:13 PM, Jeremy Stribling <strib at nicira.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Sep 01, 2010 at 02:15:09PM -0700, Jesse Gross wrote:
>>> I think this a good idea in theory but the name and description
>>> initially made me think that this was for PPP or something.  I know
>>> that VIF is somewhat Xen centric but I think the name and description
>>> were better as they were before, just without the xs prefix.  In
>>> practice, I'm pretty certain that this field will always be used for
>>> hypervisors, so I'm not sure there is much value in making it more
>>> generic beyond that.
> Actually, Justin approved "peer-mac" on purpose instead of "vif-mac" (though
> I don't think he's online to defend himself).  I think the reasoning is that
> you'll want to be able to label MACs in the physical world, where VIFs don't
> make any sense.

The issue is that in neither case is it describing the address of a
peer.  A true peer would probably be either another switch in the
physical world or a tunnel endpoint in the virtual one, neither of
which has a MAC that is of interest to us.

What about "remote-mac" or "attached-mac"?  The description as a point
to point link also seems really strange to me.  Why not simply say
"the MAC address of the device or virtual machine attached to this
interface"?