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  • Thomas Haller's avatar
    platform: support weakly tracked routing rules in NMPRulesManager · f41b4cac
    Thomas Haller authored
    Policy routing rules are global, and unlike routes not tied to an interface by ifindex.
    That means, while we take full control over all routes of an interface during a sync,
    we need to consider that multiple parties can contribute to the global set of rules.
    That might be muliple connection profiles providing the same rule, or rules that are added
    externally by the user. NMPRulesManager mediates for that.
    
    This is done by NMPRulesManager "tracking" rules.
    
    Rules that are not tracked by NMPRulesManager are completely ignored (and
    considered externally added).
    
    When tracking a rule, the caller provides a track-priority. If multiple
    parties track a rule, then the highest (absolute value of the) priority
    wins.
    
    If the highest track-priority is positive, NMPRulesManager will add the rule if
    it's not present.
    
    When the highest track-priority is negative, then NMPRulesManager will remove the
    rule if it's present (enforce its absence).
    
    The complicated part is, when a rule that was previously tracked becomes no
    longer tracked. In that case, we need to restore the previous state.
    
    If NetworkManager added the rule earlier, then untracking the rule
    NMPRulesManager will remove the rule again (restore its previous absent
    state).
    
    By default, if NetworkManager had a negative tracking-priority and removed the
    rule earlier (enforced it to be absent), then when the rule becomes no
    longer tracked, NetworkManager will not restore the rule.
    Consider: the user adds a rule externally, and then activates a profile that
    enforces the absence of the rule (causing NetworkManager to remove it).
    When deactivating the profile, by default NetworkManager will not
    restore such a rule! It's unclear whether that is a good idea, but it's
    also unclear why the rule is there and whether NetworkManager should
    really restore it.
    
    Add weakly tracked rules to account for that. A tracking-priority of
    zero indicates such weakly tracked rules. The only difference between an untracked
    rule and a weakly tracked rule is, that when NetworkManager earlier removed the
    rule (due to a negative tracking-priority), it *will* restore weakly
    tracked rules when the rules becomes no longer (negatively) tracked.
    And it attmpts to do that only once.
    
    Likewise, if the rule is weakly tracked and already exists when
    NMPRulesManager starts posively tracking the rule, then it would not
    remove again, when no longer positively tracking it.
    f41b4cac