Commits
Pablo Neira Ayuso committed 2335ba704f3
netlink: add NLM_F_NONREC flag for deletion requests In the last NFWS in Faro, Portugal, we discussed that netlink is lacking the semantics to request non recursive deletions, ie. do not delete an object iff it has child objects that hang from this parent object that the user requests to be deleted. We need this new flag to solve a problem for the iptables-compat backward compatibility utility, that runs iptables commands using the existing nf_tables netlink interface. Specifically, custom chains in iptables cannot be deleted if there are rules in it, however, nf_tables allows to remove any chain that is populated with content. To sort out this asymmetry, iptables-compat userspace sets this new NLM_F_NONREC flag to obtain the same semantics that iptables provides. This new flag should only be used for deletion requests. Note this new flag value overlaps with the existing: * NLM_F_ROOT for get requests. * NLM_F_REPLACE for new requests. However, those flags should not ever be used in deletion requests. Signed-off-by: Pablo Neira Ayuso <pablo@netfilter.org>