Subject: Re: Netlink limitations

From: Pablo Neira Ayuso <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2010 00:36:38 +0100

On 08/11/10 20:21, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> On Monday 2010-11-08 16:16, Thomas Graf wrote:
>>>
>>> Messages are not limited to 64k, individual attributes are. Holger
>>> started working on a nlattr32, which uses 32 bit for the length
>>> value.
>>
>> Also, it is not required to pack everything in attributes. Your protocol
>> may specify that the whole message payload consists of chained attributes.
>> Alternatively you may as well split your attribut chain and dump them
>> as several messages.
> 
> Yeah with NETLINK_URELEASE that seems the way to go. However, what are
> compelling arguments to use Netlink over other forms of bidirectional
> communication? (To play devils advocate, one could use nlattr32/TLVs
> over ioctl too.)

Netlink also provides an event-based notification infrastructure. Of
course, you can implement that upon a new socket family that supports
your new ioctls operations taking things in TLV format.

However, I guess that the whole thing will start looking like netlink
quite a lot in the end ;-).