Re: [RFC PATCH net-next 1/7] net: ethtool: netlink: introduce ethnl_update_bool()

Vladimir Oltean
2022-08-17T11:53:02Z

On Wed, Aug 17, 2022 at 01:27:29PM +0200, Michal Kubecek wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 17, 2022 at 01:29:14AM +0300, Vladimir Oltean wrote:
> > For a reason I can't really understand, ethnl_update_bool32() exists,
> > but the plain function that operates on a boolean value kept in an
> > actual u8 netlink attribute doesn't.
>
> I can explain that: at the moment these helpers were introduced, only
> members of traditional structures shared with ioctl interface were
> updated and all attributes which were booleans logically were
> represented as u32 in them so that no other helper was needed back then.

Thanks, but the internal data structures of the kernel did not
necessitate boolean netlink attributes to be promoted to u32 just
because the ioctl interface did it that way; or did they?

Or otherwise said, is there a technical requirement that if a boolean is
passed to the kernel as u32 via ioctl, it should be passed as u32 via
netlink too?