[Devel] Re: [PATCH] Virtual ethernet device (v2.1)

[Patrick McHardy]

Pavel Emelianov wrote:
> Patrick McHardy wrote:
> 
>>Mhh doing it later means dealing with compatibility issues, which
>>is why I'm asking now. We currently support IFLA_NAME, IFLA_MTU,
> 
> 
> Oh, I see.
> 
> 
>>IFLA_TXQLEN, IFLA_WEIGTH, IFLA_OPERSTATE and IFLA_LINKMODE, and
>>with my patch additionally IFLA_ADDRESS and IFLA_BROADCAST.
>>AFAICT they are all applicable for the partner link as well.
> 
> 
> Agree. Maybe it is better to make some generic routine to create the
> device with the parameters specified in the netlink packet. Then the
> generic code creates one end of a tunnel and calls ->new_link callback.
> This callback extracts the PARTNER packet part and calls this generic
> routine to create the second pair.


Something like that. Moving the part between NLM_F_CREATE and the
ops->newlink call of rtnl_newlink to a new function should work.

For now you could even parse the IFLA_PARTNER attribute and nested
IFLA_NAME/IFLA_ADDRESS attributes yourself and ignore the rest,
this will at least leave us the option of handling it generically
later.