> Why bloat the kernel more instead of having the SNMP daemon take
> care of it?

Because the SNMP agent can't easily do that itself; the rug just gets
pulled under it's feet by the current zeroing operation.

> The counters will wrap anyway, if not reset.

Any SNMP management station worth it's salt is prepared to deal with
32-bit counter wraparounds -- after all, at 114Mbit/s a 32-bit byte
counter only takes about 5 minutes to wrap.

The counters returned by an SNMP agent should however never reset
without also resetting sysUpTime.0, indicating that the SNMP agent has
reinitialized.

> Why should root (who might know this machine is not running any SNMP
> stuff) not be allowed to reset this counters?

I'm not opposed to the ability to reset the base for the counters
shown through the user interface.  I am however opposing having the
ability to unwittingly pull the rug under any SNMP agent's feet
without it having any meaningful way to recover properly from the
situation.

Regards,

- H=E5vard