Hi all. This is my first message here and also my first attempt at kernel development so I'm a bit nervous and afraid I'm doing something wrong. The last few days I've been toying with a patch to IPVS to allow me to use netlink to dump all services and all its destinations in a single call. The motivation for this came after profiling a kubernetes node machine with a few thousand IPVS services each with an average of two destinations. The component responsible for ensuring that the IPVS rules are correct always needs a fresh dump of all services with all destinations and currently this is accomplished by issuing a IPVS_CMD_GET_SERVICE generic netlink dump command followed by multiple IPVS_CMD_GET_DEST dump commands. The patch in question adds a new netlink command IPVS_CMD_GET_SERVICE_DEST which dumps all services where each service is followed by a dump of its destinations. It's working now on my machine and some preliminary experiments show me that there's a significant performance improvement in switching to a single call to dump everything. However, I have some questions that I'd like to talk about before trying to submit it. 1. First of all is such a patch adding a new command something desirable and could it possibly be merged or should I just drop it? 2. I can see that besides the generic netlink interface there's also another interface based on getsockopt options, should the patch also add a new socket option or is it okay for this new functionality to be exclusive to generic netlink? 3. Should this go forward, any advice on my next steps? Should I simply send the patch here? Thank you for your time!
