From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@vyatta.com>
Subject: Re: iproute2: no error message when link up command fails.
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:53:54 -0700
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	<1216247722.3422.38.camel@johannes.berg>
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Cc: Andreas Henriksson <andreas@fatal.se>,
	stephen.hemminger@vyatta.com, 489340@bugs.debian.org,
	netdev@vger.kernel.org
To: Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>
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On Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:35:22 +0200
Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net> wrote:

> 
> > > (By the way, most uses of rtnl_* seems to be if (rtnl_* < 0) exit(1); in
> > > iproute2 currently. The error messages are in libnetlink.)
> 
> > The problem is the driver is responding with an error packet but the
> > errno is 0. This looks like a kernel bug, not an library bug.
> 
> I don't think so, the recvmsg() call worked fine, but the message
> indicates that the netlink consumer had an error. Or am I missing
> something?
> 
> johannes

The netlink message in question is marked as type ERROR but the errno
encoded in the message is zero.

		if (h->nlmsg_type == NLMSG_ERROR) {
			struct nlmsgerr *err = (struct nlmsgerr*)NLMSG_DATA(h);
			if (l < sizeof(struct nlmsgerr)) {
				fprintf(stderr, "ERROR truncated\n");
			} else {
				errno = -err->error;
				if (errno == 0) {
					if (answer)
						memcpy(answer, h, h->nlmsg_len);
					return 0;
				}
				perror("RTNETLINK answers");
			}

So the netlink library just treats as a successful return.
To me it looks like the problem is in the kernel sending back
a NLMSG_ERROR with errno of zero. Some code path isn't setting
it up properly.