Re: [PATCH] Unconditionaly push mark to conntrack structure

[Patrick McHardy <kaber@trash.net>]

Patrick McHardy wrote:
> 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)

Actually this isn't true, I just noticed we never send timeout update
notifications except for the first packet (which means we have tons
of unnecessary notifier chain calls). I think this isn't really
intended and was done to work around the high timeout event generation
rate. Pablo, do you more about this?