Re: [PATCH] Unconditionaly push mark to conntrack structure

[Patrick McHardy <kaber@trash.net>]

Patrick McHardy wrote:
> 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?


More bad news .. the timeout is sent in HZ instead of USER_HZ. This
unfortunately seems to call for an ABI break, I'd really hate to add
a CTA_TIMEOUT2 attribute. I guess we can live with it since its
usually not even included in the messages.