Re: [PATCH net-next 0/5] rtnetlink: add IFA_IF_NETNSID for RTM_GETADDR

[Jiri Benc <jbenc@redhat.com>]

On Mon, 3 Sep 2018 16:41:45 +0300, Kirill Tkhai wrote:
> But this is a synthetic test, while I asked about real workflow.
> Is this real problem for lxd, and there is observed performance
> decrease?

It's actually not as much a performance problem but rather the only way
to get the data in some situations. Namely, when you have only netnsid.
This happens e.g. when you want to query a veth peer in another netns.

setns() requires a file descriptor which you don't have. Nor there is
a way to convert netnsid to a fd.

While developing the IFLA_IF_NETNSID patch, I was first thinking about
implementing an API doing the conversion. The problem is there's no
good place to put this into. It can't be done over netlink: netlink is
unreliable and you can't have the kernel open a fd for you and lose it.
There's no ioctl to use. So we'd be left with a procfs/sysfs or a
syscall.

Using netnsid to refer to the target netns seems to be a nice solution -
after all, netnsid is the identifier to use in netlink.

 Jiri