netdev - Re: [RFC] iproute: Add support for extended ack to rtnl

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Date:   Thu, 4 May 2017 22:43:18 +0200
From:   Phil Sutter <phil@....cc>
To:     Stephen Hemminger <stephen@...workplumber.org>
Cc:     David Miller <davem@...emloft.net>, dsahern@...il.com,
        daniel@...earbox.net, netdev@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [RFC] iproute: Add support for extended ack to rtnl_talk

Hi,

On Thu, May 04, 2017 at 09:43:56AM -0700, Stephen Hemminger wrote:
> On Thu, 04 May 2017 10:41:03 -0400 (EDT)
> David Miller <davem@...emloft.net> wrote:
> 
> > From: David Ahern <dsahern@...il.com>
> > Date: Thu, 4 May 2017 08:27:35 -0600
> > 
> > > On 5/4/17 3:36 AM, Daniel Borkmann wrote:  
> > >> What is the clear benefit/rationale of outsourcing this to
> > >> libmnl? I always was the impression we should strive for as little
> > >> dependencies as possible?  
> > > 
> > > +1  
> > 
> > Agreed, all else being equal iproute2 should be as self contained
> > as possible since it is such a fundamental tool.
> 
> Sorry, the old netlink code is more difficult to understand than libmnl.
> Having dependency on a library is not a problem. There already is
> an alternative implementation of ip commands in busybox for those
> people trying to work in small environments.

I second that. If you can't afford the extra ~24KB of libmnl on your
system, you much rather can't afford the 20 times bigger ip binary,
either.

Regarding conversion to libmnl, which I investigated and started working
on once: My gut feeling back then was that it's not quite worth the
effor since iproute2 requires an intermediate layer of functions anyway.
Another detail which I didn't like that much was libmnl's idiom of
creating netlink messages on base of just a plain buffer and using
mnl_nlmsg_put_header() et al. to populate it with data. I'm probably a
bit biased since I did the conversion to c99-style initializers for the
various struct req data types, but I didn't like the added run-time
overhead to achieve just the same.

So in summary, given that very little change happens to iproute2's
internal libnetlink, I don't see much urge to make it use libmnl as
backend. In my opinion it just adds another potential source of errors.

Eventually this should be a maintainer level decision, though. :)

Cheers, Phil