Possibility of adding a new netlink command to dump everything

["Cezar Sá Espinola" <cezarsa@gmail.com>]

Hi all. This is my first message here and also my first attempt at kernel
development so I'm a bit nervous and afraid I'm doing something wrong.

The last few days I've been toying with a patch to IPVS to allow me to use
netlink to dump all services and all its destinations in a single call.

The motivation for this came after profiling a kubernetes node machine with a
few thousand IPVS services each with an average of two destinations. The
component responsible for ensuring that the IPVS rules are correct always needs
a fresh dump of all services with all destinations and currently this is
accomplished by issuing a IPVS_CMD_GET_SERVICE generic netlink dump command
followed by multiple IPVS_CMD_GET_DEST dump commands.

The patch in question adds a new netlink command IPVS_CMD_GET_SERVICE_DEST
which dumps all services where each service is followed by a dump of its
destinations. It's working now on my machine and some preliminary experiments
show me that there's a significant performance improvement in switching to a
single call to dump everything. However, I have some questions that I'd like to
talk about before trying to submit it.

1. First of all is such a patch adding a new command something desirable and
could it possibly be merged or should I just drop it?

2. I can see that besides the generic netlink interface there's also another
interface based on getsockopt options, should the patch also add a new socket
option or is it okay for this new functionality to be exclusive to generic
netlink?

3. Should this go forward, any advice on my next steps? Should I simply send the
patch here?

Thank you for your time!