Re: Increasing skb->mark size

[Florian Westphal <fw@strlen.de>]

Matt Bennett <Matt.Bennett@alliedtelesis.co.nz> wrote:
> On Tue, 2015-11-24 at 21:36 +0100, Florian Westphal wrote:
> > Matt Bennett <Matt.Bennett@alliedtelesis.co.nz> wrote:
> > > I'm emailing this list for feedback on the feasibility of increasing
> > > skb->mark or adding a new field for marking. Perhaps this extension
> > > could be done under a new CONFIG option. Perhaps there are other ways we
> > > could achieve the desired behaviour?
> > 
> > Well I pointed you towards connlabels which provide 128 bit of space
> > in the conntrack extension area but you did not tell me why you cannot
> > use it.
> Sorry, I moved the discussion to this list to hopefully gather some new
> ideas/opinions.
> 
> While connlabels provide 128bits of space skb->mark is still only 32
> bits. Since we are using connection tracking to simply restore skb->mark
> the use of connlabels by itself doesn't solve the problem I outlined
> above. skb->mark would still needs to be increased in size.

We have ctnetlink which allows direct setting of ctmark/ctlabels.

Regarding ctlabels, they were originally designed to provide a bit-set
so that ctmark could be used as an 'enumeration' type while ctlabels
could be used to provide distinct, non-overlapping labels.