Re: pull request: batman-adv 2012-11-07

From: Antonio Quartulli <redacted>
Date: Wed,  7 Nov 2012 20:11:30 +0100

Hello David,

first of all thank you for having made us aware of the packet format problem in
batman-adv! The impact of __packed on performances was not entirely known to me,
in particular for what concerns the RISC arch.

We have to change a number of packet formats before we can remove __packed
everywhere which will obviously break compatibility.

However we already scheduled a compatibility break because we want to
heavily improve our packet formats and to provide a more flexible framework that
would allow us to add new types and features while reducing the probability of
breaking compatibility again and again as happened in the past (we are
implementing TypeLengthValue (TLV) containers among other things).

To avoid breaking compatibility (at least) twice we decided to fix now (in this
patchset) what is fixable with no consequences to compatibility while we would
ilike to defer the remaining changes for the scheduled compatibility break.

In this patchset you have the two new features intended for net-next/linux-3.8:
1) the new UNICAST_4ADDR packet type
2) the Distributed ARP Table (DAT) component

The new packet type has been reviewed to entirely address the alignment issue.
At the same time we also reviewed the other packet types but as I told you
before, we will send these changes later.

Other than that you have patch 02/12 that removes the __packed attribute from
the structures where it was not really needed.

Pulled, thanks.