Honestly, looking at the dladm man page makes it look pretty good to my eyes. It's technical, and long, but the fact that it seems to go into the capabilities in great detail and how to use it as well as includes twenty separate examples at the bottom is something I see as a good sign. This is exactly the kind of reference, that included with a couple test systems to play with, I could use to figure out how to implement a network design.

Whether it accurately explains the capabilities of etherstub I don't know, but it seems to do a good job explaining what it is and is used for. The basic usage is detailed within one of the examples. I'm not sure what you're comparing it to that you think would be a superior way to document it though. I honestly can't imagine it being better in Linux in any way. Windows, it would probably be explained better, but you might have to pay a few hundred dollars for the documentation or training, whether it be from Microsoft or a third party.

> It's conceptually different. You can easily use the OpenBSD man pages, because they map nicely to every other Unix system concept.

Not any more than SmartOS, I'm sure. IIRC, CARP is an OpenBSD designed protocol to compete with Cisco's proprietary VRRP. pfsync is their tool and protocol to sync PF (their own custom firewall implementation) states across a network link. sasync is their own protocol and implementation to sync IPSEC security associations across the network. These were eventually adopted and ported to FreeBSD, but they are far from "every other Unix system concept".

I view OpenBSD and IllumOS/SmartOS to be even more similar in approach now than I did prior to this discussion.