> perhaps I misunderstand something, but nla_parse suggests attribute > type can not be 0: [...] Yes, some - very few - families still insist on using attribute 0, perhaps parsing by hand or so. Like you say though, the entire infrastructure makes that hard and undesirable, so I don't really see why we need to invest the extra code/work into making it work *here*, especially since it's such a corner case as I described in my other email. johannes