From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Sebastian Herbszt Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 03/11] lpfc: Deprecate lpfc_soft_wwn parameter Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2016 00:31:52 +0100 Message-ID: <20161230003152.000056b7@gmx.de> References: <5858682a.Twfv0+hfi3tqtT1c%james.smart@broadcom.com> <20161222230059.000006e1@gmx.de> <1a6d026b-f896-84a9-2c81-9a3bfebd01dd@broadcom.com> <20161228193832.00000ba9@gmx.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Received: from mout.gmx.net ([212.227.15.19]:49920 "EHLO mout.gmx.net" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751416AbcL2XcP (ORCPT ); Thu, 29 Dec 2016 18:32:15 -0500 In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-scsi-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org To: James Smart Cc: linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org, Hannes Reinecke , "Martin K. Petersen" , Sebastian Herbszt James, thank you for taking the time to answer me. James Smart wrote: > Sebastian, > > "not portable" isn't the right way to describe it. It's not a > chip-architecture issue, but rather that some oem platforms have > side-band management that overrides anything that could have been > done in the os, and in ways that may not be easy to communicate back > to the driver. "not portable" might not be the term I actually meant. Let's call it server vendor dependent. Can you please elaborate on the oem platforms and side-band management you mean? I know of a solution called "ServerView Virtual-IO Manager" by Fujitsu which might fit. AFAIK it is a piece of software which communicates with the BMC and allows to change the MAC address and WWN. Of course it only works with Fujitsu servers and supported cards. I think I heard that for NICs it just changes the MAC address in the eeprom. This is not done "online" but when the server is powered on. Even though this might be a comparable case (external MAC address configuration) I think the ability to change the MAC address by the means of "ip link set dev ethX address" was not removed. > FAWN - true Brocade only - but that is the 70+% > market share of the FC switches. The current implementation already > doesn't work many situations - so there's no clear winner for having > it work everywhere. Given the inability for it always to work, the > decision was to deprecate the attribute. > > -- james How do you choose the desired WWN between the possible options (factory set, oem platform set, FA-WWN)? And wouldn't soft wwn always win because it is applied at last? However it might compete with FA-WWN. I wasn't yet able to find details on how it works. Sebastian