Contributions to netifd

[Joerg Vehlow]

Hi,

we are a company of experts for automotive software and are working for
many customers in the automotive industry.

One of our customers (a big german automotive supplier) is looking for a
network configuration solution with some specific limitations and after
evaluating several alternatives (e.g. network manager, wicked, ...) we
ended up with netfid being the best solution giving the requirements.

However netifd does not (yet) fully fit the requirements and instead of
developing a fork, our customer would like to contribute to OpenWRT
directly and integrate required features/changes.

Some examples of what we know at the moment what would be needed:
 - We may need static linking of the libraries used in netifd. I saw
that this is basically possible, but a bit broken IIRC.
 - One of the requirement (For security reasons) is, that the system
should be able to run without a script interpreter (not even a shell),
but we need dhcp. So one of the first proposals would be creating a dhcp
protocol implementation in c
 - VPN configuration (possible ipsec with strongswan) will be required
and we would also need to implement this directly in c.
 - As far as I can see, there is no tooling for QoS/tc in openwrt at the
moment. This is probably also required and could be implemented as part
of netifd.
 - Traffic filtering is one more point on our list of requirements. I
know that you use fw3 and I saw fw4 for nftables. However I guess fw4
will not work for us, because of ucode, but I could be wrong here.

I guess most of the changes could also help the OpenWRT community. If
some of the changes are not really what you want for OpenWRT users, we
could also think about implementing a plugin API, much like the proto
handler API, but without additional exec-calls.

Would these kind of contributions be wanted by OpenWRT?

Regards
Joerg