Re: [Patch iproute2] ipaddress: do not add ifa_flags when not necessary

[Cong Wang <xiyou.wangcong@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 6:59 AM, David Miller <davem@davemloft.net> wrote:
> From: Cong Wang <xiyou.wangcong@gmail.com>
> Date: Thu,  3 Apr 2014 23:05:03 -0700
>
>> commit 37c9b94ed21d5779acc23d89a4 (add support for extended ifa_flags)
>> introduced a regression:
>>
>>       # ./ip/ip addr add 192.168.0.1/24 dev eth0
>>       RTNETLINK answers: Invalid argument
>>
>> This is due to old kernels don't support IFA_FLAGS flag, it should be skipped
>> if we don't use this feature at all.
>>
>> Cc: Jiri Pirko <jiri@resnulli.us>
>> Cc: Stephen Hemminger <stephen@networkplumber.org>
>> Signed-off-by: Cong Wang <xiyou.wangcong@gmail.com>
>
> Your patch doesn't really fully fix the problem.
>
> If the kernel rejects because of presence of the IFA_FLAGS attribute,
> it will do so for all such cases.
>
> Therefore the guard you need is not whether ifa_flags is NULL, but
> whether a large enough flag bit is set such that IFA_FLAGS is required.
>
> IFA_FLAGS was added because ifa.ifa_flags is too small for the new
> values we needed to add.

Right, we should use IFA_FLAGS only when ifa_flags > 0xFF.

Thanks!