Comment 28 for bug 1720126

I concur with option 2), unnecessary deviation will just cause confusion.

Regarding the other buffer sizes, the last time I looked they were mostly OK. The issue reared its head in this particular case because the netlink message that previously had a pretty constant per-netdev response size suddenly had the ability to balloon with "no warning". A number of workarounds exist (i.e. you have to explicitly ask for the VF info), but, in this case we actually want the VF info and iproute2 was just unprepared for the size of it.

I guess the core issue is that it's entirely possible for the kernel to add extra netlink attributes to any query response, iproute2 makes the assumption that the queries it's making is not necessarily going to explode with gigabytes of new annotations and 16k will easily fit any current real-world system. A pragmatic approach would probably be to handle the "Message Truncated" path with a dynamically sized buffer as an exceptional case.

Any fix in iproute2 that "properly" addresses this issue has to be carefully vetted. Who knows how many inherent races will get exposed if the ip command doubles in execution time.