Jesse, please feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

As far as I know, this is part of the plan on improving how user space and
kernel are treating missing attributes.

Missing attribute has to be interpreted to be some default value, and the
value is usually opaque to the other side of the protocol. When a mask is
applied to the field, The opaque value may be matched unintentionally.  In
general, we feel that having opaque values will make the netlink protocol
error prone. The saving in netlink bandwidth is not worth the trouble.

For backward compatibility reasons, some fields, such as in_port and
eth_type, we will continue to allow them to be missing, Priority and
skb_mark, on the hand, can be made explicit and still be backward
compatible,

Although not fix any bug in particular, this is part the clean up effort.
Kernel side of change is already in.


On Sat, Aug 3, 2013 at 2:22 PM, Ben Pfaff <b...@nicira.com> wrote:

> The commit message doesn't say why.  Why?
>
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