Re: Please backport bridge multicast exponential field encoding fix series to 6.1.y/6.6.y/6.12.y/6.18.y/7.0.y

[Ido Schimmel]

On Fri, Jul 17, 2026 at 04:12:09PM +0530, Ujjal Roy wrote:
> > It does not force the users to use a value < 128. You would need to
> > return EINVAL for that, which i'm not proposing. Returning an error
> > could break user space.
> >
> 
> While I understand that clamping avoids breaking user space, silently
> modifying the value might lead to unexpected behavior that is
> difficult for users to debug.
> Because of these side effects, I am hesitant to proceed without the
> Multicast maintainer's input. We should raise an open issue on this
> topic to get their official decision, otherwise my preference is to
> ignore patching this for the stable kernel versions entirely.

We asked to target these patches at net-next because they don't fix a
regression (the encoding never worked correctly), so they are not
relevant for stable. Users that require this functionality should
upgrade to a new kernel that contains the patches.

Regarding the stable-specific patch, in my experience, stable
maintainers don't accept such patches and prefer to backport patches
from upstream, even if it results in more changes.