[dpdk-dev] Common netlink parsing?

Thomas Monjalon thomas at monjalon.net
Sat Apr 25 21:37:06 CEST 2020


25/04/2020 21:24, Stephen Hemminger:
> While adding error handling to tap device, I noticed we already have two
> places rolling their own netlink message handling (tap and mlx5) and now
> with proposed IF proxy there is a third.
> 
> Netlink is non-trivial and easy to get wrong and doing error handling
> also requires work. There should be a common library for this.
> 
> My preference would be to use pre-existing code (libmnl) but the
> DPDK maintainers seem to have an aversion to taking a dependency on
> any external code and reinvent everything (see RCU etc).

We should avoid reinventing wheels.
About RCU, I think it was said no library meets the same requirements.
Honnappa, any comment?

About libmnl, it was used in mlx5 some time ago.
It has been removed when it was thought it is not required anymore.
Maybe you could demonstrate libmnl benefit by integrating it with
the tap PMD first.




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