Re: condition for 2.6.16

[Patrick McHardy <kaber@trash.net>]

Massimiliano Hofer wrote:
> On Friday 28 April 2006 5:34 pm, Patrick McHardy wrote:
> 
> 
>>Hehe :) Yes, its not nice, but I refuse to add stupid limits just
>>because the infrastructure can't cleanly support per-instance state
>>(which is what makes it ugly, its not the shared state). And its not
>>so bad, the uglyness comes down to two or three extra lines of code,
>>one additional pointer in the data structure and one offsetof in
>>userspace.
> 
> 
> Nontheless, I think modifying userspace because 2 kernel functions can't talk 
> to each other is a bit silly.
> It would be relatively easy to modify the kernel in order to support instance 
> data (extensive, but simple and relatively safe).
> Do you think there would be a strong resistance to a patch in mainline kernel?

It is silly, but we have to live with it. I see two possibilities, one
breaks userspace, one is extremly expensive. I like neither one.
We should just add a clean netlink configuration interface modelled
after the existing ones instead of building workarounds in this
clearly broken interface. I mostly don't care about costs of a
compatibility layer if we get a sane infrastructure in return.