On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 08:20:59AM -0500, Jarod Wilson wrote: > On Tue, Feb 09, 2016 at 08:52:38PM -0800, Eric Dumazet wrote: > > On Tue, 2016-02-09 at 17:41 -0800, Stephen Hemminger wrote: > > > On Tue, 9 Feb 2016 18:51:35 -0500 > > > Jarod Wilson <ja...@redhat.com> wrote: > > > > > > > On Tue, Feb 09, 2016 at 11:17:57AM -0800, Stephen Hemminger wrote: > > > > > Support for the new rx_nohandler statistic. > > > > > This code is designed to handle the case where the kernel reported > > > > > statistic > > > > > structure is smaller than the larger structure in later releases (and > > > > > vice versa). > > > > > > > > This seems to work here, for the most part. However, if you are running > > > > a > > > > kernel with the new counter, and the counter happens to contain 0, > > > > aren't > > > > we going to not print anything? > > > > > > That is the desirable outcome, since if run on older system the > > > output format will not change from current format. > > > > The problem here is that a change in output might break some user > > scripts using sed/whatever games. > > > > So it might be better to output a zero field, so that such breakages are > > detected early, even if no packet was dropped at the time the new kernel > > was tested. > > > > Having a binary that adds the new field only in some cases hides the > > change. It looks fine for us humans, but not for programs processing the > > output. > > On my test setup, my bond's active interface currently has 0, while the > backup interface has a few thousand, so I can alternate back and forth > checking the interfaces, and one doesn't print the counter while the other > does, which is what seemed odd to me and prompted the added ugliness. But > most setups (anything outside of bond/team currently) should never have > this counter incremented, we do have prior art with the compressed fields, > and scripts really probably ought to be scraping stats out of sysfs rather > than using ip, so I can sort of understand not wanting the added ugliness. > I do tend to prefer consistency though.
FWIW, I tend to agree with Jarod and Eric on this. Consistency seems better, even if 0 all the time.
