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From: Patrick McHardy <kaber@trash•net>
To: Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@medozas•de>
Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft•net>,
	Holger Eitzenberger <heitzenberger@astaro•com>,
	Pablo Neira Ayuso <pablo@netfilter•org>,
	netdev@vger•kernel.org
Subject: Re: Netlink limitations
Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2010 13:24:26 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <4CD93D7A.2010305@trash.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LNX.2.01.1011091303250.21752@obet.zrqbmnf.qr>

Am 09.11.2010 13:10, schrieb Jan Engelhardt:
> 
> On Sunday 2010-11-07 18:17, Patrick McHardy wrote:
>> On 07.11.2010 17:44, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
>>> we mentioned it only briefly at the Netfilter workshop a few weeks ago, 
>>> but as I am trying to figure out how to use Netlink in Xtables, 
>>> Netlink's limitations really start ruining my day.
>>>
>>> The well-known issue is that NL messages[sic] the kernel is supposed to 
>>> receive have a max size of 64K, due to nlmsghdr's use of uint16_t. This 
>>> is very problematic because attributes can easily amass more than 64K. 
>>> Think of a chain full of rules, represented by a top-level attribute 
>>> that nests attributes. The problem is bidirectional, a table 
>>> dump has the same problem.
>>
>> Messages are not limited to 64k, individual attributes are. Holger
>> started working on a nlattr32, which uses 32 bit for the length
>> value.
> 
> Does he have a format specification available?

As I said, the basic idea is to use a length value of zero to indicate
that the length should be read from a second length member. Basically:

struct nlattr32 {
	__u16 nla_len;
	__u16 nla_type;
	__u32 nla_len2;
};


      reply	other threads:[~2010-11-09 12:24 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 16+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2010-11-07 16:44 Netlink limitations Jan Engelhardt
2010-11-07 17:17 ` Patrick McHardy
2010-11-08 15:16   ` Thomas Graf
2010-11-08 19:21     ` Jan Engelhardt
2010-11-08 23:36       ` Pablo Neira Ayuso
2010-11-09  9:27     ` Patrick McHardy
2010-11-09 14:49       ` Thomas Graf
2010-11-09 20:20         ` Jan Engelhardt
2010-11-09 21:40           ` Thomas Graf
2010-11-09 22:02             ` Jan Engelhardt
2010-11-09 23:35               ` Thomas Graf
2010-11-09 23:42                 ` Jan Engelhardt
2010-11-09 23:54                   ` Thomas Graf
2010-11-09 11:58     ` Jan Engelhardt
2010-11-09 12:10   ` Jan Engelhardt
2010-11-09 12:24     ` Patrick McHardy [this message]

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