From: Johannes Berg <johan...@sipsolutions.net> Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2016 12:09:03 +0200
> At netconf, we talked about how awkward it can be that one doesn't know > if an attribute was accepted by the kernel or simply ignored because > it's not supported (older kernel version). > > I considered (and Emmanuel has started to cook up a patch for it) > adding a flag here meaning "reject if not parsed" (or so). > > Now, I realize that with all the existing netlink commands one can't > actually rely on that (since it requires some infrastructure), but new > commands in existing families and also entirely new generic netlink > families would allow let userspace rely on such a thing. I like this nlattr flag idea, it's opt-in and any tool can be updated to use the new facility. I'd be willing the backport the nlattr flag bit change to all stable releases as well.
