Re: [ANNOUNCE 0/7] Open-iSCSI/Linux-iSCSI-5 High-Performance Initiator

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@SteelEye.com>]

On Sat, 2005-07-30 at 12:53 -0700, David S. Miller wrote:
> From: James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@SteelEye.com>
> Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2005 12:32:42 -0500
> 
> > FIB has taken your netlink number, so I changed it to 32
> 
> MAX_LINKS is 32, so there is no way this reassignment would
> work.

Actually, I saw this and increased MAX_LINKS as well.  I was going to
query all of this on the net-dev mailing list if we'd managed to get the
code compileable.

> You have to pick something in the range 0 --> 32, and as is
> no surprise, there are no numbers available :-)
> 
> Since ethertap has been deleted, 16-->31 could be made allocatable
> once more, but I simply do not want to do that and have the flood
> gates open up for folks allocating random netlink numbers.
> 
> Instead, we need to take one of those netlink numbers, and turn
> it into a multiplexable layer that can support an arbitrary
> number of sub-netlink types.  Said protocol would need some
> shim header that just says the "sub-netlink" protocol number,
> something as simple as just a "u32", this gets pulled off the
> front of the netlink packet and then it's passed on down to the
> real protocol.

I'll let the iSCSI people try this ...

Alternatively, if they don't fancy it, I think the kobject_uevent
mechanism (which already has a netlink number) looks like it might be
amenable for use for most of the things they want to do.

James