Re: [PATCH net-next 0/3] make nla_nest_start() add NLA_F_NESTED flag

Johannes Berg
2019-04-26T09:24:28Z

On Fri, 2019-04-26 at 09:13 +0000, Michal Kubecek wrote:

> Another observation was that even if NLA_F_NESTED flag was introduced in
> 2007, only few netlink based interfaces set it in kernel generated messages
> and even many recently added APIs omit it. That is unfortunate as without
> the flag, message parsers not familiar with attribute semantics cannot
> recognize nested attributes and do not see message structure; this affects
> e.g. wireshark dissector or mnl_nlmsg_fprintf() from libmnl.

Indeed.

I wonder if we should also (start) enforcing that the userspace sender
side sets this, if the policy is strict?

johannes