On Dec 11 2007 11:25, Patrick McHardy wrote: > Jan Engelhardt wrote: >> Introduce the xt_mark match revision 1. It uses fixed types, >> with the goal of obsoleting revision 0 some day (uses nonfixed types). > > I don't know. We already have all this compat crap because > we specifically don't want to obsolete old userspace binaries, > so the only benefit I see is a minor decrease in overhead > when loading rules. > There are two sorts of compatibility. * "Post-breakage fixes" like ->compat_from_user and ->compat_to_user which have to deal with 32-bit user / 64-bit kernel * ->revision which is a good architecture to keep older interfaces a little longer. The ->revision game is ok IMHO; there will always be revision differences between user- and k-space, and it is a nice architecture for new-behavior revisions. But the ->compat* fluff is not really needed anymore once switched to fixed types everywhere (reasonable time needed). Old revisions should be purged after a "reasonable time" (whatever that means for everyone), or perhaps whenever there is a Linux kernel version with a trailing .0 (2.7.0, 2.8.0), or when great new things appear (pkttables, or whatever is in the works). I think the step should better be made now than later, or this cruft will be carried for the next 10 instead of 5 years. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netfilter-devel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
