Re: 2.6.12: connection tracking broken?

Harald Welte wrote:
> I have to agree with Bart.  I don't know any bridging-packetfilter setup
> that doesn't use ipt_physdev in FORWARD :(

It shouldn't be a problem to MARK in ebtables and use the marks instead.
So far I think we can only remove the support for locally generated
packets, but the way bridge-netfilter and ip-netfilter interact causes
some more problems and inconsistencies which I would like to look into
first. One thing I've noticed is that NF_IP_LOCAL_OUT, NF_IP_FORWARD and
NF_IP_POST_ROUTING get called for every clone when packets are delivered
to multiple ports, which causes unexpected results with REJECT (many
packets sent in response to a single one) and probably others. This
could be avoided by only passing packets to the NF_IP_* hooks once, but
that would make the physdev match useless.

Another problem is defragmentation, we've added the user argument to
ip_defrag to avoid packets from jumping through the stack between
different callers. With bridge-netfilter defragmentation in
NF_IP_PRE_ROUTING can be reached from both the IP layer and the bridge
layer, so packets can still jump (see netfilter bugzilla #339).

I expect there are more problems, I hope I can find some time to look
into it this week.

Regards
Patrick