netdev - Re: gre: minor cleanups in netlink interface

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Message-ID: <48F0BB77.6080401@trash.net>
Date:	Sat, 11 Oct 2008 16:43:03 +0200
From:	Patrick McHardy <kaber@...sh.net>
To:	Herbert Xu <herbert@...dor.apana.org.au>
CC:	"David S. Miller" <davem@...emloft.net>,
	Linux Netdev List <netdev@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: gre: minor cleanups in netlink interface

Herbert Xu wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 06:04:52PM +0200, Patrick McHardy wrote:
>> Some minor cleanups, there doesn't seem to be a reason for not
>> using the typeful helpers everywhere.
> 
> The reason for that was future IPv6 support.  But I suppose having
> it as a be32 for now doesn't prevent us from changing it later, or
> does it?

No, its equivalant to using memcpy.

>> I noticed the interface expects to always get a full configuration
>> on change requests. Is there are particular reason for not
>> supporting incremental changes, lets say
>>
>> "ip link change dev gre0 type gre remote <new remote>"
>>
>> ? It looks easy enough to change, so I could take care of this.
> 
> I think this should be done in iproute.  That way the user (or
> rather the user-space programmer) gets to choose the behaviour.
> This is also how the existing interface works too.

We don't have much precedent for rtnl_link besides VLAN (which
does support incremental changes), but actually all other route
netlink interfaces do support incremental changes by sending only
a subset of the attributes. A reason for supporting this in the
interface is that incremental userspace changes will always be
racy because you need two seperate operations.
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