From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@vyatta.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/2] iproute: Add route showdump command (v2)
Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2012 10:05:57 -0700
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Cc: Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@linux-foundation.org>,
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To: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@parallels.com>
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On Fri, 27 Jul 2012 10:06:15 +0400
Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@parallels.com> wrote:

> I mean something like the below, just put the RTM_GETADDR stream into a
> file and push it back into the kernel as is. It worked for me in trivial
> cases, but is this approach correct generically?

It is supposed to always work to reverse netlink messages back to the kernel.
There a couple of caveats:
 1. Some fields like statistics are just ignored by the kernel and can never
    be reset.
 2. The feature isn't commonly used and it is always possible that it will
    expose a kernel bug.