This new abstraction layer allows multiple implementations of network
devices in a single running process. This will be useful, for example, to
support network devices that are simulated entirely in the running process
or that communicate with other processes over Unix domain sockets, etc.
The reimplemented tap device support in this commit has not been tested.
At startup, the vswitch needs to delete datapaths that are not configured
by the administrator. Until now this was done by knowing the possible
names of Linux datapaths. This commit cleans up by allowing each
datapath class to enumerate its existing datapaths and their names.
The userspace tools were allowing the name of any internal port to be used
to identify a datapath. This, however, makes it hard to enumerate all the
names by which a datapath can be known, and it was never documented or
intentional behavior, so this commit disables it.
The dpif and netdev code has had various ways to check for changes to
dpifs and netdevs over the course of Open vSwitch development. All of
these have been thus far fairly specific to the Linux implementation. This
commit is the start of a more general API for watching for such changes.
The dpif-related parts seem fairly mature and so they are documented,
the netdev parts will probably need to change somewhat and so they are
not documented yet.
This commit initially introduces only a single datapath implementation,
which is the same as the original one, but it paves the way for
additional implementations, such as the upcoming userspace datapath.
