Subject: Re: Question about e06e7c615877026544ad7f8b309d1a3706410383 -- [IPV4]: The scheduled removal of multipath cached routing support.

From: Nick Bowler <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2010 13:21:37 -0400

On 18:11 Thu 25 Mar     , Richard Hartmann wrote:
> I was wondering what the rationale for commit
> e06e7c615877026544ad7f8b309d1a3706410383 is. We upgraded our custom
> image to 2.6.33 recently and found those options to be missing.

>>From the diff of that commit:

-What:	Multipath cached routing support in ipv4
-When:	in 2.6.23
-Why:	Code was merged, then submitter immediately disappeared leaving
-	us with no maintainer and lots of bugs.  The code should not have
-	been merged in the first place, and many aspects of it's
-	implementation are blocking more critical core networking
-	development.  It's marked EXPERIMENTAL and no distribution
-	enables it because it cause obscure crashes due to unfixable bugs
-	(interfaces don't return errors so memory allocation can't be
-	handled, calling contexts of these interfaces make handling
-	errors impossible too because they get called after we've
-	totally commited to creating a route object, for example).
-	This problem has existed for years and no forward progress
-	has ever been made, and nobody steps up to try and salvage
-	this code, so we're going to finally just get rid of it.
-Who:	David S. Miller <[email-masked]>

-- 
Nick Bowler, Elliptic Technologies (http://www.elliptictech.com/)