Re: [PATCH net 1/2] net: advertise 'netns local' property via netlink

[Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>]

On Fri, 7 Feb 2025 10:10:49 +0100 Nicolas Dichtel wrote:
> Le 07/02/2025 à 00:39, Jakub Kicinski a écrit :
> > On Thu,  6 Feb 2025 17:50:26 +0100 Nicolas Dichtel wrote:  
> >> Since the below commit, there is no way to see if the netns_local property
> >> is set on a device. Let's add a netlink attribute to advertise it.  
> > 
> > I think the motivation for the change may be worth elaborating on.
> > It's a bit unclear to me what user space would care about this
> > information, a bit of a "story" on how you hit the issue could
> > be useful perhaps? The uAPI is new but the stable tag indicates
> > regression..  
> To make it short: we were trying a new NIC with a custom distro provided by a
> vendor (with out of tree drivers). We were unable to move the interface in
> another netns. Thanks to ethtool we were able to confirm that the 'netns-local'
> flag was set. Having this information helps debugging.

Thanks, makes sense. Still a bit unsure if this is a stable candidate,
if you don't mind net-next that'd be my preference. If you do mind,
I'll live with it :)

> >> @@ -2041,6 +2042,7 @@ static int rtnl_fill_ifinfo(struct sk_buff *skb,
> >>  		       netif_running(dev) ? READ_ONCE(dev->operstate) :
> >>  					    IF_OPER_DOWN) ||
> >>  	    nla_put_u8(skb, IFLA_LINKMODE, READ_ONCE(dev->link_mode)) ||
> >> +	    nla_put_u8(skb, IFLA_NETNS_LOCAL, dev->netns_local) ||  
> > 
> > Maybe nla_put_flag() ? Or do you really care about false being there?  
> It depends if the commit is backported or not. If it won't be backported, having
> the false value helps to know that the kernel support this attribute (and so
> that the property is not set).

Wish we had a good solution for this, it's always the argument against
flags :(