netlink: advertise incomplete dumps

Consider the following situation:
 * a dump that would show 8 entries, four in the first
   round, and four in the second
 * between the first and second rounds, 6 entries are
   removed
 * now the second round will not show any entry, and
   even if there is a sequence/generation counter the
   application will not know

To solve this problem, add a new flag NLM_F_DUMP_INTR
to the netlink header that indicates the dump wasn't
consistent, this flag can also be set on the MSG_DONE
message that terminates the dump, and as such above
situation can be detected.

To achieve this, add a sequence counter to the netlink
callback struct. Of course, netlink code still needs
to use this new functionality. The correct way to do
that is to always set cb->seq when a dumpit callback
is invoked and call nl_dump_check_consistent() for
each new message. The core code will also call this
function for the final MSG_DONE message.

To make it usable with generic netlink, a new function
genlmsg_nlhdr() is needed to obtain the netlink header
from the genetlink user header.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Berg <johannes.berg@intel.com>
Acked-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Signed-off-by: John W. Linville <linville@tuxdriver.com>

1 files changed, 24 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/net/netlink.h b/include/net/netlink.h
index 02740a94f108..98c185441bee 100644
--- a/include/net/netlink.h
+++ b/include/net/netlink.h
@@ -638,6 +638,30 @@ static inline int nlmsg_unicast(struct sock *sk, struct sk_buff *skb, u32 pid)
 	     nlmsg_ok(pos, rem); \
 	     pos = nlmsg_next(pos, &(rem)))
 
+/**
+ * nl_dump_check_consistent - check if sequence is consistent and advertise if not
+ * @cb: netlink callback structure that stores the sequence number
+ * @nlh: netlink message header to write the flag to
+ *
+ * This function checks if the sequence (generation) number changed during dump
+ * and if it did, advertises it in the netlink message header.
+ *
+ * The correct way to use it is to set cb->seq to the generation counter when
+ * all locks for dumping have been acquired, and then call this function for
+ * each message that is generated.
+ *
+ * Note that due to initialisation concerns, 0 is an invalid sequence number
+ * and must not be used by code that uses this functionality.
+ */
+static inline void
+nl_dump_check_consistent(struct netlink_callback *cb,
+			 struct nlmsghdr *nlh)
+{
+	if (cb->prev_seq && cb->seq != cb->prev_seq)
+		nlh->nlmsg_flags |= NLM_F_DUMP_INTR;
+	cb->prev_seq = cb->seq;
+}
+
 /**************************************************************************
  * Netlink Attributes
  **************************************************************************/