The patch looks good to me now, but I have two questions:
On Sat, 7 Mar 2026 13:41:57 -0500
Jon Maloy
nl_addr_get() was not setting the prefix_len output parameter for IPv6 addresses, only for IPv4. This meant callers always got 0 for IPv6, forcing them to use a hardcoded default (64).
Fix by assigning *prefix_len even in the IPv6 case.
We also add another functional change. We now check for if an AF_INET address is link local, in which case we have to skip it.
The reason why the original code skipped IPv6 link-local addresses and not IPv4 link-local ones is that copying a IPv6 link-local address clearly makes no sense and breaks things. For IPv4 I wasn't quite sure, and it seemed to work just like other addresses, so I never took care of excluding them. I tend to think it's correct to exclude them, also for consistency with IPv6, but I'm not quite sure if we risk breaking something. I have some vague recollection of link-local addresses being used in some cloud (probably Google Computing Platform), at least for some Podman tests. I'll try to find some pointers to it. Did you already look into the matter, though? By the way, this makes things inconsistent with nl_addr_dup() (used by the vast majority of users), where IPv4 link-local addresses are copied just like all the other ones.
Although it is conventional to set the scope of such addresses to RT_SCOPE_LINK,
You mean that users manually do that? I think it's kind of rare actually. Does the kernel do that? Or configuration agents such as NetworkManager? I wonder a bit what you consider as "user" here.
this is not stated in any RFC, and we cannot trust it to have been set correctly by the user, just as we cannot trust it to have been set correctly for any other AF_INET address. We therefore add this check explicitly on the address itself.
-- Stefano