[Devel] Re: current state of netns

[Daniel Lezcano]

Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> "Denis V. Lunev" <den at sw.ru> writes:
> 
>> Hello, Eric!
>>
>> I see that you quite busy and there is no reaction from Dave for your latest
>> portion of netns patches. Right now, me and Pavel are working exclusively for
>> mainstream.
>>
>> May be we could bring a torch from your hands and start to push Dave Miller even
>> with IPv4 staff. 3 weeks passed, no reaction for you latest code. Looks like it
>> has been missed somehow... I even have to stop my fingers every day from
>> touching a generic structures like flowi :)
> 
> Short summary. 
> - The merge window opened late.
> - All of the netns code needs to be to Dave Miller before the merge window.
> - My last round of changes were not bug fixes and were sent after Dave
>   had stopped accepting feature additions for 2.6.24
> 
> Therefore after the merge window when Dave Miller is ready to queue up
> more networking patches I expect progress can be made again.
> 
> I think the only thing that is happening is unfortunate timing.
> 
> I'm not really opposed to people taking my patches or something like
> them cleaning them up and running with them, I just think the current
> slow down bad timing.  We have achieved the hard part which is to
> get the core network namespace infrastructure accepted.
> 
> On another note.  While I think using CONFIG_NET_NS is nice.  I really
> only introduced it so that production kernels can avoid enabling an
> experimental feature.  So far it still looks sane to me to remove
> CONFIG_NET_NS when things are solid and we can remove the experimental
> tag.
> 
> As for ipv4 and ipv6.  However we do that we want to very carefully
> sequence the patches so that we increasingly make the network
> namespace infrastructure fine grained.  Similar to make locks fine
> grained.  I did that for my core network namespaces patches but that
> careful ordering still needs to happen for my ipv4 patches.

Denis, Pavel,

this is great to have you with us for netns. Do you mind if we follow 
the rule : "patches sent to netdev@ are coming from Eric's git tree, any 
enhancements are posted to Eric/containers" ?
So at least, we have the patches stacked and that give us time to review 
and to test.

Eric, what do you think about that ?

By the way, Benjamin and I, we are making ipv6 per namespace. We will 
send a first patchset for addrconf, ndisc, ip_fib6, fib6_rules probably 
at the end of the week or at the begin of the next week.

We are also planning to choose a small patch subset from Eric's tree for 
ipv4 to be proposed to containers@ before sending it to netdev@ (we 
should be here very careful and send ipv4, piece by piece, and ensure at 
all cost init_net_ns will not be broken).

I don't have a clear idea when the merge window will be closed. I guess, 
we should resend af_netlink, af_unix and af_packet before sending 
anything new, like af_inet.

Can we coordinate our effort, what do you plan to do ?

Regards.

	-- Daniel