This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
3.6 ifnet and ifaddr Specialization
The ifnet and ifaddr structures contain general information applicable to all network interfaces and protocol addresses. To accommodate additional device and protocol-specific information, each driver defines and each protocol allocates a specialized version of the ifnet and ifaddr structures. These specialized structures always contain an ifnet or ifaddr structure as their first member so that the common information can be accessed without consideration for the additional specialized information.
Most device drivers handle multiple interfaces of the same type by allocating an array of its specialized ifnet structures, but others (such as the loopback driver) handle only one interface. Figure 3.20 shows the arrangement of specialized ifnet structures for our sample interfaces.
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Figure 3.20. Arrangement of ifnet structures within device-dependent structures.
Notice that each device's structure begins with an ifnet structure, followed by all the device-dependent data. The loopback interface declares only an ifnet structure, since it doesn't require any device-dependent data. We show the Ethernet and SLIP driver's softc structures with the array index of 0 in Figure 3.20 since both drivers support multiple interfaces. The maximum number of interfaces of any given type is limited by a configuration parameter when the kernel is built.
The arpcom structure (Figure 3.26) is common to all Ethernet drivers and contains information for the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) and Ethernet multicasting. The le_softc structure (Figure 3.25) contains additional information unique to the LANCE Ethernet device driver.
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
Each protocol stores addressing information for each interface in a list of specialized ifaddr structures. The Internet protocols use an in_ifaddr structure (Section 6.5) and the OSI protocols an iso_ifaddr structure. In addition to protocol addresses, the kernel assigns each interface a link-level address when the interface is initialized, which identifies the interface within the kernel.
The kernel constructs the link-level address by allocating memory for an ifaddr structure and two sockaddr_dl structures—one for the link-level address itself and one for the link-level address mask. The sockaddr_dl structures are accessed by OSI, ARP, and the routing algorithms. Figure 3.21 shows an Ethernet interface with a link-level address, an Internet address, and an OSI address. The construction and initialization of the link-level address (the ifaddr and the two sockaddr_dl structures) is described in Section 3.11.
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Figure 3.21. An interface address list containing link-level, Internet, and OSI addresses.