Jan Engelhardt wrote: > 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). The revision thing was a hack that I introduced myself to let us add several improvements that we really needed at that time, actually it is not something we should abuse IMO. > 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. I hope that we'll get that long-awaited netlink interface for iptables before those 10 years goes by and we all become museum pieces :) -- "Los honestos son inadaptados sociales" -- Les Luthiers - 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
