Re: [PATCH] Unconditionaly push mark to conntrack structure

[Patrick McHardy <kaber@trash.net>]

Eric Leblond wrote:
> This is needed in userspace as the mark can be used to select 
> efficiently a subset of the conntrack events to work on.

I'm a bit reluctant to special case mark, but mostly because I wonder
whether we shouldn't just behave like all other networking subsystems
and send update messages containing the entire new state. If you look
at the optional information:

- status bits are only 4 byte.
- timeout is currently transmitted for every packet anyway - its better
  to just reduce the event rate (we even had a patch for this for ages)
- protoinfo: at least for the majority of traffic (tcp) included in
  every message as well
- helpinfo: most connections don't have helpers

The mark is currently missing entirely (your patch is on top of one
of my patches I didn't submit yet), another 4 bytes.

So basically we have an extra 8 bytes per message and reduce complexity
for users by sending the entire state .. a good tradeoff in my opinion.
With the patch to reduce timer events we should still need _a lot_ less
bandwidth than today.