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).
I actually just added compat support for MARK v1 since we
need that for old ip6tables binaries.
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.
Mhh .. well, I guess I would apply patches that fix the types
for all matches and targets and adds the old revisions to
feature-removal-schedule with a timeframe of maybe two years.
But this should happen for all of them at once, we don't
want 20 different dates for removal.
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