Connector protocol

[luke-titley]

Is this a question about neli specifically? If so, please describe.

Hello, I'm trying to work out if neli (in its current state) can be used for tracing proc_events using the netlink Connector protocol. I can't find any mention of the types similar to those declared in 'linux/cn_proc.h' used by netlink Connector programs written in C.

Apologies in advance if my question is completely out of place. I'm hoping neli can help me avoid bindgen and wrangling unsafe c wrappers.

[jbaublitz]

Hi @luke-titley, likely the data structures are not implemented yet, but if you submit a PR or are willing to provide me with documentation to work off, I'd be open to adding it.

[luke-titley]

Ok that sounds great.

[jbaublitz]

Okay, feel free to either submit a PR or a link to documentation! I'll keep an eye out.

[Bben01]

Hi

I did a bit of research into this interface and came across this blog post, which I found pretty informative: https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php/The_Proc_Connector_and_Socket_Filters

There’s also a Rust crate that attempts to provide an abstraction over it: https://github.com/yorodm/cnproc-rs

If you can give me a few pointers on where to start, I’d be happy to try contributing a PR

[jbaublitz]

@Bben01 Okay, I'd absolutely accept a PR if you're able to provide one. I'll also take a look at the documentation your provided. For starters, my guess is that the protocol is already supported. You will likely just need to be able to model the data structures that need to be sent in the packets. I can absolutely help with that. One hurdle that sometimes comes up is libc constants. Usually I try to contribute those constants upstream to the libc crate before I try to implement it on the neli side. If you need inspiration for the data structures, nl.rs, rtnl.rs and genl.rs have a lot of existing examples to build off of. Is there any other direction I can give you in the meantime or any specific questions I can answer?

[Bben01]

Hi @jbaublitz, sorry for the delay.

I posted a draft PR at #277, could you please look at it (I have a few questions that I wrote there)?

[jbaublitz]

Hi @Bben01! I'll try to take a look at it this weekend.