Re: [PATCH] include/net/genetlink.h: Allow genlmsg_cancel to accept a NULL argument

On Tue, 1 Feb 2011, David Miller wrote:

From: Julia Lawall <redacted>
Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2011 16:43:40 +0100 (CET)

quoted

nlmsg_cancel can accept NULL as its second argument, so for similarity,
this patch extends genlmsg_cancel to be able to accept a NULL second
argument as well.

Signed-off-by: Julia Lawall <redacted>

I did a scan of all of the cases where this interface is used, and
I cannot find a situation where this capability would even be useful.

The use pattern is always:

	hdr = genlmsg_put(skb, ...);
	if (!hdr)
		goto out;

	NLA_PUT_*();
	NLA_PUT_*();
	....

	return genlmsg_end(skb, hdr);

nla_put_failure:
	genlmsg_cancel(skb, hdr);
out:
	return -EWHATEVER;

This pattern occurred in eg:

net/netlabel/netlabel_unlabeled.c

in the function netlbl_unlabel_staticlist_gen and in other netlabel code, 
as well as in net/wireless/nl80211.c, but with the function nl80211hdr_put 
instead of genlmsg_put.  I submitted patches for all of these cases, so 
that is perhaps why you don't see them.  But someone suggested to change 
genlmsg_cancel as well, to be as permissive as nlmsg_cancel.

For nlmsg_cancel, there are two occurrences in 
net/netfilter/nf_conntrack_netlink.c where nlmsg_cancel is reachable with 
the second argument NULL.

For nlmsg_cancel the ability to accept NULL as a second argument comes 
from the fact that it only calls nlmsg_trim, which does nothing if NULL is 
the second argument.  nlmsg_trim is also called by nla_nest_cancel.  There 
are many calls to nla_nest_cancel with NULL as the second argument in the 
directory net/sched, for example in the function gred_dump in 
net/sched/sch_gred.c.  net/sched also contains a call to nlmsg_trim with 
NULL as the second argument, in the function flow_dump, in 
net/sched/cls_flow.c.

The whole thing seems somewhat sloppy.  I'm sure that all of the 
above-cited occurrences could be rewritten as outlined above to skip over 
the cancel/trim function.

julia