Re: pull request: batman-adv 2012-11-07

[David Miller <davem-fT/PcQaiUtIeIZ0/mPfg9Q@public.gmane.org>]

From: Antonio Quartulli <ordex-GaUfNO9RBHfsrOwW+9ziJQ@public.gmane.org>
Date: Wed,  7 Nov 2012 20:11:30 +0100

> Hello David,
> 
> first of all thank you for having made us aware of the packet format problem in
> batman-adv! The impact of __packed on performances was not entirely known to me,
> in particular for what concerns the RISC arch.
> 
> We have to change a number of packet formats before we can remove __packed
> everywhere which will obviously break compatibility.
> 
> However we already scheduled a compatibility break because we want to
> heavily improve our packet formats and to provide a more flexible framework that
> would allow us to add new types and features while reducing the probability of
> breaking compatibility again and again as happened in the past (we are
> implementing TypeLengthValue (TLV) containers among other things).
> 
> To avoid breaking compatibility (at least) twice we decided to fix now (in this
> patchset) what is fixable with no consequences to compatibility while we would
> ilike to defer the remaining changes for the scheduled compatibility break.
> 
> In this patchset you have the two new features intended for net-next/linux-3.8:
> 1) the new UNICAST_4ADDR packet type
> 2) the Distributed ARP Table (DAT) component
> 
> The new packet type has been reviewed to entirely address the alignment issue.
> At the same time we also reviewed the other packet types but as I told you
> before, we will send these changes later.
> 
> Other than that you have patch 02/12 that removes the __packed attribute from
> the structures where it was not really needed.

Pulled, thanks.