On 9/29/2017 1:49 AM, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 02:02:58PM -0600, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 10:37:40PM +0300, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
We find it useful on an ongoing basis, more like some standard NICs
providing debugfs interface to read/write from/to some of its registers.
Usually if such interface is spotted during submission, it will be requested
to drop it. Ask Salil, who lately upstreamed new ETH driver and was asked
to remove it.
To be fair Salil's was dropped more or less for security reasons..
I think debugfs to dump truely internal state that is not intended to
be API stable is reasonable.
Yes, it can be ripped in any point of life, despite the screaming.
We also can't count on debugfs always being available. To me that's the
main problem with it.
Promise you will not be tooling on top of this, or use it as an
interface in your manager or something crazy like that. You must be
happy in all cases if your distro chooses to disable debugfs.
Honestly, I don't know if we can trust to Intel's promises.
>
Among other promises, they wrote that OmniPath Ethernet Management part
will be open sourced too. It seems like it wasn't at the end.
My google searches with words "ethernet manager omni-path" revealed nothing.
I don't think we are "at the end" yet. The EM is a work in progress and
*will* be open sourced. I don't work on that bit of code so I can't tell
you when exactly.
All of this vnic stuff is a work in progress and we are incrementally
pushing things out. Iterative development, involving the community and all.
The problem I have with reviewing all the vnic patches is that I don't
have a spec for vnic or anything, and I don't really know what the
data being dumped is..
My problem with those patches that they don't show whole picture and the
more important you have no way to see it, if you want it.
Right now, it is legal code-sharing and not truly open-source which I would like to see.
eg I would have been much happier if ipoib
dump'd its debugfs stuff through netlink connected to neighbor objects
- I don't know if this is something similar...
Sounds like a good idea to me.
As Leon says, you should really think carefully if this needs to be
something that admins are going to be told to look at when vnic isn't
working properly, as the ipoib debufs is. In that case netlink is a
stable API and more suitable.
Suffice to say, I think we agree on that. Leon and I have talked
recently and I made it clear my intention is to lessen our reliance on
debugfs and rely more on netlink by way of rdma tool.
-Denny
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