Hi Michal, On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 10:35:41AM +0100, Michal Kubecek wrote: > On Mon, Feb 19, 2018 at 06:09:39PM +0100, Phil Sutter wrote: > > What puzzles me about your argumentation is that you seem to propose for > > the kernel to cover up flaws in userspace. Spinning this concept further > > would mean that if there would be an old bug in iproute2 we should think > > of adding a workaround to rtnetlink interface in kernel because > > containers will keep the old iproute2 binary? Or am I (hopefully) just > > missing your point? > > Actually, that's what we already do. This is from rtnl_dump_ifinfo(): > > /* A hack to preserve kernel<->userspace interface. > * The correct header is ifinfomsg. It is consistent with rtnl_getlink. > * However, before Linux v3.9 the code here assumed rtgenmsg and that's > * what iproute2 < v3.9.0 used. > * We can detect the old iproute2. Even including the IFLA_EXT_MASK > * attribute, its netlink message is shorter than struct ifinfomsg. > */ The reason why this is in place (and should be IMHO) is that commit 88c5b5ce5cb57 ("rtnetlink: Call nlmsg_parse() with correct header length") incompatibly changed uAPI. I have a different example which reflects what I have in mind, namely iproute2 commit 33f6dd23a51c4 ("ip fou: pass family attribute as u8") which basically does: | - addattr16(n, 1024, FOU_ATTR_AF, family); | + addattr8(n, 1024, FOU_ATTR_AF, family); If kernel cares about those userspace bugs, shouldn't the better fix be to make it expect u16 in FOU_ATTR_AF and check whether the high or low byte contains the expected value? Cheers, Phil -- 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