On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 12:20 PM, Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 10/12/2017 12:06 PM, David Miller wrote: >> From: Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli@xxxxxxxxx> >> Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2017 08:43:59 -0700 >> >>> Once we move ethtool (or however we name its successor) over to >>> netlink there is an opportunity for accessing objects that do and do >>> not have a netdevice representor today (e.g: management ports on >>> switches) with the same interface, and devlink could be used for >>> that. >> >> That is an interesting angle for including this in devlink. >> >> I'm not so sure what to do about this. >> >> One suggestion is that devlink is used for getting ethtool stats for >> objects lacking netdev representor's, and a new genetlink family is >> used for netdev based ethtool. > > Right, I was also thinking along those lines that we we would have a new > generic netlink family for ethtool to support ethtool over netlink. new api is fine by me. The reason for suggesting devlink was because some of the devlink port_* ops are close to ethtool ops that can operate on a port/netdev. eg split_port could be a netdev operation unless you want to split before the netdev is created. There are some ops in devlink which are global hw parameters and not specific to a port, those fit perfectly with devlinks original goal. > >> >> I think it's important that we don't expand the scope of devlink >> beyond what it was originally designed for. > > It seems to me like devlink is well defined in what it is not for: it is > not meant to be used for any object that is/has a net_device, but it is > not well defined for what it can offer to these non network devices. For > instance, we have a tremendous amount of operations that are extremely > specific to its single user(s) such as mlx5 and mlxsw. > > For instance, I am not sure how the buffer reservation scheme can be > generalized, and this is always the tricky part with a single user > facility in that you try to generalize the best you can based on the HW > you know. This is not a criticism or meant to be anything negative, this > just happens to be the case, and we did not have anything better. > > So maybe the first thing is to clarify what devlink operations can and > should be and what they are absolutely not allowed to cover. We should > also clarify whether a generic set/get that Steven is proposing is > something that we tolerate, or whether there should be specific function > pointers implemented for each attribute, which would be more in line > with what has been done thus far. > -- > Florian
