Glendix on Routers?

Glen-concept #1

Glendix for routers? I was poking around for what it would take to get there. I found this. I am basically looking to have a way to do routing using Glendix. You can already do that on any standard Linux using Quagga (see http://www.quagga.net/docs/quagga.html#SEC3 ). They use a traditional dynamic library approach with architecture specific code.

I plan to expose the UNIX Kernel Routing Table as a filesystem instead. Then do the routing protocols, and other actions like updating the table from information from other routers, and load-balancing etc from userspace scripts. The advantage is that, we will not need any daemons working directly on top of the kernel. Our simple userspace scripts that do the routing can hack on the, say /net/ether0/route  file.

One of the factors that will excite people will obviously be a awesome infrastructure to test new routing protocols in real networks, without writing complex architecture-specific daemons for GNU Zebra. Plus, I wonder what network mounts of such directories might lead us to achieve?!

UPDATE (May 03, 2009): Further discussion of this idea led to me applying to GSoC 2009 with this proposal. Although the idea was not selected, I got some valuable feedback and the project is still on (probably with a more relaxed timeline, and aligned towards Glendix rather than Plan 9 from Bell Labs).