Hi,

On Mon, Nov 27, 2023 at 11:49:16AM +0000, Felix Huettner wrote:

conntrack zones are heavily used by tools like openvswitch to run multiple virtual "routers" on a single machine. In this context each conntrack zone matches to a single router, thereby preventing overlapping IPs from becoming issues. In these systems it is common to operate on all conntrack entries of a given zone, e.g. to delete them when a router is deleted. Previously this required these tools to dump the full conntrack table and filter out the relevant entries in userspace potentially causing performance issues.

To do this we reuse the existing CTA_ZONE attribute. This was previous parsed but not used during dump and flush requests. Now if CTA_ZONE is set we filter these operations based on the provided zone. However this means that users that previously passed CTA_ZONE will experience a difference in functionality.

Alternatively CTA_FILTER could have been used for the same functionality. However it is not yet supported during flush requests and is only available when using AF_INET or AF_INET6.

You mean, AF_UNSPEC cannot be specified in CTA_FILTER?

Please, extend libnetfilter_conntrack to support for this feature, there is a filter API that can be used for this purpose.

Thanks.