From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S265091AbTGGQi5 (ORCPT ); Mon, 7 Jul 2003 12:38:57 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S267074AbTGGQi5 (ORCPT ); Mon, 7 Jul 2003 12:38:57 -0400 Received: from evrtwa1-ar2-4-33-045-074.evrtwa1.dsl-verizon.net ([4.33.45.74]:31952 "EHLO grok.yi.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S265091AbTGGQi4 (ORCPT ); Mon, 7 Jul 2003 12:38:56 -0400 Message-ID: <3F09A57D.8030003@candelatech.com> Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2003 09:53:17 -0700 From: Ben Greear Organization: Candela Technologies User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030529 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Patrick McHardy CC: Linux Kernel Mailing List , netdev@oss.sgi.com Subject: Re: RFC: another approach for 64-bit network stats References: <3F097E4D.1080707@trash.net> In-Reply-To: <3F097E4D.1080707@trash.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Patrick McHardy wrote: > This patch implements a lockless aproach for 64-bit netstatistics with > only a very rare > racecondition. On 64 bit system, nothing is changed. On 32 bit system I think that you should consider providing a new API as opposed to breaking existing APIs. And, perhaps this new API could deal with the very rare race to make it never happen? No matter how rare it is, you still have to write code to work around it if it exists..might as well do it once in the kernel instead of making each user of the interface deal with it. Personally, I'd like to see the net-device stats (64-bit or otherwise) available through the ethtool interface in a well defined binary package (perhaps a struct net_device_stats, or similar.) Ben -- Ben Greear President of Candela Technologies Inc http://www.candelatech.com ScryMUD: http://scry.wanfear.com http://scry.wanfear.com/~greear