> > But by design SFP, SFP+, and QSFP cages are not fixed function network
> > adapters. They are physical and logical devices that can adapt to
> > what is plugged into them. How the devices are exposed should be
> > irrelevant to this conversation it is about the underlying
> > connectivity.
>
> Apologies - I was under the impression that SFP and friends were a
> physical-layer thing and that a MAC in the SoC would still be fixed such
> that its DMA and interrupt configuration could be statically described
> regardless of what transceiver was plugged in (even if some configurations
> might not use every interrupt/stream ID/etc.) If that isn't the case I shall
> go and educate myself further.
Hi Robin
It gets interesting with QSFP cages. The Q is quad, there are 4 SERDES
lanes. You can use them for 1x 40G link, or you can split them into 4x
10G links. So you either need one MAC or 4 MACs connecting to the
cage, and this can change on the fly when a modules is ejected and
replaced with another module. There are only one set of control pins
for i2c, loss of signal, TX disable, module inserted. So where the
interrupt/stream ID/etc are mapped needs some flexibility.
There is also to some degree a conflict with hiding all this inside
firmware. This is complex stuff. It is much better to have one core
implementing in Linux plus some per hardware driver support, than
having X firmware blobs, generally closed source, each with there own
bugs which nobody can fix.
Andrew
