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From: Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>
To: davem@davemloft.net
Cc: netdev@vger.kernel.org, edumazet@google.com, pabeni@redhat.com,
	andrew+netdev@lunn.ch, horms@kernel.org, donald.hunter@gmail.com,
	Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>
Subject: [PATCH net-next 1/2] netlink: specs: nlctrl: fix the policy attribute numbering
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2026 19:15:15 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20260916021516.1701760-1-kuba@kernel.org> (raw)

mask and pad are declared the wrong way round, giving mask 11 and
pad 12, while enum netlink_policy_type_attr has
NL_POLICY_TYPE_ATTR_PAD at 11 and NL_POLICY_TYPE_ATTR_MASK at 12.

The kernel emits the mask for every NLA_POLICY_MASK() attribute, so a
Python YNL client parsing a policy dump maps it onto pad and throws it
away - 30 of them in ethtool's policy alone.  In the other direction the
64-bit alignment padding, which the kernel does emit on architectures
without efficient unaligned access, is decoded as a u64 mask and blows
up the whole dump. But those architectures are rare.

The generated C parser is not affected, it keys the attributes off the
uAPI symbol names rather than off the values the spec derives.

Signed-off-by: Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>
---
 Documentation/netlink/specs/nlctrl.yaml | 6 +++---
 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/netlink/specs/nlctrl.yaml b/Documentation/netlink/specs/nlctrl.yaml
index 7e7c158e3e73..6acac4aeab03 100644
--- a/Documentation/netlink/specs/nlctrl.yaml
+++ b/Documentation/netlink/specs/nlctrl.yaml
@@ -156,12 +156,12 @@ doc: |
       -
         name: bitfield32-mask
         type: u32
-      -
-        name: mask
-        type: u64
       -
         name: pad
         type: pad
+      -
+        name: mask
+        type: u64
       -
         name: byte-order
         doc: Byte order of the attribute, absent means host byte order.
-- 
2.55.0


             reply	other threads:[~2026-09-16  2:15 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 5+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2026-09-16  2:15 Jakub Kicinski [this message]
2026-09-16  2:15 ` [PATCH net-next 2/2] netlink: specs: nlctrl: let getfamily take a family id Jakub Kicinski
2026-09-17  8:56   ` Donald Hunter
2026-09-17  8:56 ` [PATCH net-next 1/2] netlink: specs: nlctrl: fix the policy attribute numbering Donald Hunter
2026-09-18  0:10 ` patchwork-bot+netdevbpf

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