The generic netlink family builds on top of netlink and provides
simplifies access for the less demanding netlink users. It solves
the problem of protocol numbers running out by introducing a so
called controller taking care of id management and name resolving.
Generic netlink modules register themself after filling out their
id card (struct genl_family), after successful registration the
modules are able to register callbacks to command numbers by
filling out a struct genl_ops and calling genl_register_op(). The
registered callbacks are invoked with attributes parsed making
life of simple modules a lot easier.
Although generic netlink modules can request static identifiers,
it is recommended to use GENL_ID_GENERATE and to let the controller
assign a unique identifier to the module. Userspace applications
will then ask the controller and lookup the idenfier by the module
name.
Due to the current multicast implementation of netlink, the number
of generic netlink modules is restricted to 1024 to avoid wasting
memory for the per socket multiacst subscription bitmask.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Graf <tgraf@suug.ch>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Introduces a new type-safe interface for netlink message and
attributes handling. The interface is fully binary compatible
with the old interface towards userspace. Besides type safety,
this interface features attribute validation capabilities,
simplified message contstruction, and documentation.
The resulting netlink code should be smaller, less error prone
and easier to understand.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Graf <tgraf@suug.ch>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
infrastructure for it.
Let it rip!
Thomas Graf