Re: [RFC net-next] ipv4: Don't promote secondaries when flushing addresses

[Phil Sutter <phil@nwl.cc>]

Hi Jakub,

On Thu, Jun 07, 2018 at 02:17:50PM +0200, Jakub Sitnicki wrote:
> On Thu, 7 Jun 2018 13:00:29 +0200
> Michal Kubecek <mkubecek@suse.cz> wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, Jun 07, 2018 at 12:13:01PM +0200, Jakub Sitnicki wrote:
> > > Promoting secondary addresses on address removal makes flushing all
> > > addresses from a device with 1000's of them slow. This is because we
> > > cannot take down the secondary addresses when we are removing the
> > > primary one, which would make it faster.
> > > 
> > > However, the userspace, when performing a flush, will in the end remove
> > > all the addresses regardless of secondary address promotion taking
> > > place. Unfortunately the kernel currently cannot distinguish between a
> > > single address removal and a flush of all addresses.
> > > 
> > > To help with this case introduce a IFA_F_FLUSH flag that can be used by
> > > userspace to signal that a removal operation is being done because of a
> > > flush. When the flag is set, don't bother with secondary address
> > > promotion as we expect that secondary addresses will be removed soon as
> > > well.  
> > 
> > Unless you intend to use the flag to allow deleting a specific address
> > with its secondaries (overriding promote_secondaries), maybe it would
> > be more practical to go even further and delete all addresses on the
> > interface if IFA_F_FLUSH is set so that userspace could delete all
> > addresses with one request.
> 
> Thanks for input, Michal. The intend as I understand it is to make
> flushing all the addresses fast(er). Let me see if I can rework it
> according to your suggestion. It does make more sense to do it like
> that to me too.

Yes, I agree with Michal. IIRC, flushing a specific primary along with
all it's secondaries from an interface is not even supported by
iproute2, so no need to optimize for that I guess. OTOH, if your
solution allowed to get rid of that nasty loop in ipaddr_flush(), I owe
you one extra beer at the next occasion. :)

Thanks for holding on to this old ticket!

Cheers, Phil