Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next 00/25] bonding: introduce new option API

From: Dan Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2014 09:59:43 -0600

On Tue, 2014-01-21 at 15:54 +0100, Nikolay Aleksandrov wrote:
> Hi,
> This patchset's goal is to introduce a new option API which should be used
> to properly describe the bonding options with their mode dependcies and
> requirements. With this patchset applied we get centralized option
> manipulation, automatic RTNL acquire per option setting, automatic option
> range checking, mode dependcy checking and other various flags which are
> described in detail in patch 01's commit message and comments.
> Also the parameter passing is changed to use a specialized structure which
> is initialized to a value depending on the needs.
> The main exported functions are:
>  __bond_opt_set() - set an option (RTNL should be acquired prior)
>  bond_opt_init(val|str) - init a bond_opt_value struct for value or string
>                           parameter passing
>  bond_opt_tryset_rtnl() - function which tries to acquire rtnl, mainly used
>                           for sysfs
>  bond_opt_parse - used to parse or check for valid values
>  bond_opt_get - retrieve a pointer to bond_option struct for some option
>  bond_opt_get_val - retrieve a pointer to a bond_opt_value struct for
>                     some value
> 
> The same functions are used to set an option via sysfs and netlink, just
> the parameter that's passed is usually initialized in a different way.
> The converted options have multiple style fixes, there're some longer
> lines but they looked either ugly or were strings/pr_warnings, if you
> think some line would be better broken just let me know :-) there're
> also a few sscanf false-positive warnings.
> I decided to keep the "unsuppmodes" way of mode dep checking since it's
> straight forward, if we make a more general way for checking dependencies
> it'll be easy to change it.
> 
> Future plans for this work include:
>  - Automatic sysfs generation from the bond_opts[].
>  - Use of the API in bond_check_params() and thus cleaning it up (this has
>    actually started, I'll take care of the rest in a separate patch)
>  - Clean up all option-unrelated files of option definitions and functions
> 
> I've tried to leave as much documentation as possible, if there's anything
> unclear please let me know. One more thing, I haven't moved all
> option-related functions from bonding.h to the new bond_options.h, this
> will be done in a separate patch, it's in my todo list.
> 
> This patchset has been tested by setting each converted option via sysfs
> and netlink to a couple of wrong values, a couple of correct values and
> some random values, also for the opts that have flags they have been
> tested as well.

Currently userspace has to encode a lot of the same logic the kernel has
for option validation, for example when creating a user interface for
this stuff, you have to know that miimon and arp are incompatible, and
that certain options are only relevant with certain bond modes, and it's
a mess.  And this also sometimes changes when new kernel options or
capabilities are added.

So, is there any good way to describe the valid value ranges or
capabilities for userspace?  One idea is to send a package of bond
options to the kernel and see if they validate before actually applying
them, though this only works when actually configuring the interface.
An additional idea would be to somehow describe the available options
(eg, value ranges for numeric values, list-of-strings for bond modes,
etc) that the kernel supports before any bonds are even created (thus
probably through netlink, not sysfs).

Thoughts?

Dan

> Best regards,
>  Nikolay Aleksandrov
> 
> CC: Andy Gospodarek <[email-masked]>
> CC: Jay Vosburgh <[email-masked]>
> CC: Veaceslav Falico <[email-masked]>
> CC: Scott Feldman <[email-masked]>
> CC: David S. Miller <[email-masked]>
> 
> Nikolay Aleksandrov (25):
>   bonding: add infrastructure for an option API
>   bonding: convert mode setting to use the new option API
>   bonding: convert packets_per_slave to use the new option API
>   bonding: convert xmit_hash_policy to use the new option API
>   bonding: convert arp_validate to use the new option API
>   bonding: convert arp_all_targets to use the new option API
>   bonding: convert fail_over_mac to use the new option API
>   bonding: convert arp_interval to use the new option API
>   bonding: convert arp_ip_target to use the new option API
>   bonding: convert downdelay to use the new option API
>   bonding: convert updelay to use the new option API
>   bonding: convert lacp_rate to use the new option API
>   bonding: convert min_links to use the new option API
>   bonding: convert ad_select to use the new option API
>   bonding: convert num_peer_notif to use the new option API
>   bonding: convert miimon to use the new option API
>   bonding: convert primary to use the new option API
>   bonding: convert primary_reselect to use the new option API
>   bonding: convert use_carrier to use the new option API
>   bonding: convert active_slave to use the new option API
>   bonding: convert queue_id to use the new option API
>   bonding: convert all_slaves_active to use the new option API
>   bonding: convert resend_igmp to use the new option API
>   bonding: convert lp_interval to use the new option API
>   bonding: convert slaves to use the new option API
> 
>  drivers/net/bonding/bond_main.c    |  179 +++---
>  drivers/net/bonding/bond_netlink.c |   87 ++-
>  drivers/net/bonding/bond_options.c | 1086 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++---------
>  drivers/net/bonding/bond_options.h |  170 ++++++
>  drivers/net/bonding/bond_procfs.c  |   25 +-
>  drivers/net/bonding/bond_sysfs.c   |  519 +++--------------
>  drivers/net/bonding/bonding.h      |   29 +-
>  7 files changed, 1214 insertions(+), 881 deletions(-)
>  create mode 100644 drivers/net/bonding/bond_options.h
>