[Devel] Re: [PATCH] Virtual ethernet device (tunnel)

[Eric W. Biederman]

Patrick McHardy <kaber at trash.net> writes:

> jamal wrote:
>> On Wed, 2007-02-05 at 14:34 +0200, Patrick McHardy wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>>Thats a lot better than using sysfs, but I think it would be
>>>preferrable to use rtnetlink instead of genetlink for network
>>>configuration.
>> 
>> 
>> or you can just hold rtnl while using genl.
>> I do agree it would be easier to just use rtnetlink ...
>
>
> The rtnl needs to be held in either case, but using a different
> netlink family introduces races in message processing. For example
> a simple:
>
> ip link add dev veth0
> ip route add 10.0.0.0/8 dev veth0
>
> might fail because we have two different input queues and the routing
> message might get processed before the link message.

The consensus from the last thread was pretty much that we need
to implement RTM_NEWLINK and RTM_DELLINK, if it is at all possible.

So that we can get code reuse between different virtual devices.
Although I suspect we will need some per type attribute parsing.

Eric