Re: [rfc] new sk_buff member: hwstamp

[Octavian Purdila <opurdila@ixiacom.com>]

On Monday 14 July 2008, Andi Kleen wrote:

>
> You only need this between the driver and the socket recvmsg(), don't you?
>

Correct.

> One possible alternative (I admit I haven't thought all the implications
> through) would be to use a second magic internal skb for this which has the
> same UDP header, but as only payload the time stamp. Disadvantage would
> be the requirement to do header parsing in the driver, but often
> hardware does that already.
>

Hmm, this sounds interesting. 

Maybe only keep the timestamp without the UDP header and queue the skb 
as "ancillary" data?

And we can probably do this in a generic way for all sort of socket types 
(PF_PACKET comes to mind) - just add a special ancillary data queue in the 
socket. Sure this would mean stuffing the sockets structures - not very 
different from adding new stuff in skb :), but I feel it is a bit more 
generic: an easy to extend channel of communication between drivers/hw and 
userspace without future structures overhead. 

And I think this will help with solving the hw TX stamp problem I am looking 
into, as well (how to send the hw generated TX stamp to application). 

Thanks,
tavi