Re: [patch net-next] net: increase the size of priv_flags and add IFF_OVS_DATAPATH

[Simon Horman <horms@verge.net.au>]

On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 08:44:08PM -0700, David Miller wrote:
> From: Simon Horman <horms@verge.net.au>
> Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2010 11:26:41 +0900
> 
> > IFF_OVS_DATAPATH is a place-holder for the Open vSwitch datapath
> > which I am preparing to submit for merging.
> > 
> > As all 16 bits of priv_flags are already assigned flags, also increase
> > the size of priv_flags to 32 bits.
> > 
> > Unfortunately, by my calculations this increases the size of
> > struct net_device by 4 bytes on 32bit architectures and
> > 8 bytes on 64 bit architectures. I couldn't see an obvious
> > way to avoid that.
> > 
> > Cc: Jesse Gross <jesse@nicira.com>
> > Signed-off-by: Simon Horman <horms@verge.net.au>
> 
> I can't think of a better way out of this, so applied for now.
> 
> Maybe somehow some of those bonding specific flags can get put
> down into the bonding private structure.  However, that might
> not be possible if the sole reason those live in ->priv_flags
> is to allow tests of the flags outside of the bonding code.

Thanks.

It seems to me that there is ample scope to do something.
But nothing seems obviously correct.