From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Patrick McHardy Subject: NFNL_NFA_NEST Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2007 06:08:11 +0100 Message-ID: <4600BDBB.8020205@trash.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-15 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Pablo Neira Ayuso To: Netfilter Development Mailinglist Return-path: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Sender: netfilter-devel-bounces@lists.netfilter.org Errors-To: netfilter-devel-bounces@lists.netfilter.org List-Id: netfilter-devel.vger.kernel.org One of the worst mistakes in nfnetlink in my opinion was the introduction of the NFNL_NFA_NEST bit. It prevents us from using a large part of the generic netlink stuff, since that just interprets it as a really huge attribute type. Since its not used even for anything, this is really annoying. Unfortunately there is no easy way to get rid of it, current userspace code sends it to the kernel, so even if we stop including it in the kernel, we need to deal with it for compatibilty. What I want to propose is to stop sending it on both kernel and userspace side immediately, but continue to accept it for another year or two. After this time, we switch to use the generic netlink stuff, which would break using old libnfnetlink users. Since we just introduced a new API and are fading out the old one anyway, this doesn't seem too bad. Any comments?