Re: [PATCH net-next 1/1] rtnetlink: request RTM_GETLINK by pid or fd

From: Christian Brauner
Date: Thu Jan 18 2018 - 15:56:03 EST


On Thu, Jan 18, 2018 at 09:29:14PM +0100, Jiri Benc wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Jan 2018 21:21:24 +0100, Christian Brauner wrote:
> > In such scenarios setting a netns id property is
> > not really wanted
>
> Why? I think that's what you should do if you want to avoid setns. Just
> use netnsid. I don't see any problem with that and you didn't provide
> any explanation.

Ah, sorry, maybe I was to brief. When creating and destroying a lot of
short-lived network namespaces it seems unnecessary to give them all
label/netns id. Using a netns id makes much more sense when you want a
persistent, long-living network namespace. For example, iproute2 where
you want to create a persistent network namespace that sticks around via
ip netns add bla && ip netns set bla 5.

A more concrete scenario is creating a network namespace, moving a
device into it via RTM_SETLINK which also supports IFLA_NET_NS_{FD,PID}
and then wanting to query the device. This would be very easy to do if
one could reuse the IFLA_NET_NS_{FD,PID} without having to set a
netnsid.

Christian