[Labeled-nfs] Pipes vs Netlink

[Paul Moore]

On Wednesday, September 12 2007 11:13:47 am Paul Moore wrote:
> On Wednesday, September 12 2007 10:37:53 am David P. Quigley wrote:
> > On Wed, 2007-09-12 at 10:36 -0400, Paul Moore wrote:
> > > On Wednesday, September 12 2007 9:52:51 am David P. Quigley wrote:
> > > > Any input on this would be appreciated. This is pretty much the only
> > > > thing stopping me from moving forward with finishing the DOI mapper
> > > > infrastructure.
> > >
> > > I vote for the netlink approach and I would encourage you to make use
> > > of generic netlink rather than the connector if possible.
> >
> > What is wrong with the connector interface. I haven't seen that much on
> > netlink in either direction in the kernel so if you know of something
> > that I should be aware of I'd appreciate knowing.
>
> Sorry, I probably should have elaborated a bit more in my original email.
>
> My concern is that both the connector and generic netlink perform very
> similar roles in that they are designed to carry messages between userspace
> and the kernel.  Granted there are several mechanisms in the kernel that
> are designed to do this, but generic netlink and the userspace connector
> are an interesting case because they both use standard netlink as the
> underlying transport mechanism.  I personally tend to like generic netlink
> as it is a pretty think layer on top of standard netlink which makes use of

Oops ... that should read "pretty _thin_ layer"

> a lot of the existing netlink API both in kernel and userspace.  The
> connector is a different beast as it is event/callback driven and has it's
> own, different API.  While both generic netlink and the connector mechanism
> have a rather limited number of users in the mainline kernel, standard
> netlink has a lot of users in the kernel and as a result I think sticking
> with the mechanism that is closest to the standard netlink has value from a
> community perspective.
>
> As I originally said, I'm _encouraging_ you to use generic netlink over the
> userspace connector not saying you _have_ to use generic netlink.  Pick the
> right tool for the job.



-- 
paul moore
linux security @ hp