From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from exprod7og115.obsmtp.com ([64.18.2.217]:32941 "EHLO exprod7og115.obsmtp.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753660Ab2GWPJ6 (ORCPT ); Mon, 23 Jul 2012 11:09:58 -0400 Message-ID: <500D6932.8090306@genband.com> Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2012 09:09:38 -0600 From: Chris Friesen MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Don Dutile CC: Ben Hutchings , David Miller , yuvalmin@broadcom.com, gregory.v.rose@intel.com, netdev@vger.kernel.org, linux-pci@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: New commands to configure IOV features References: <5003DC9B.8000706@broadcom.com> <5005BD00.4090106@redhat.com> <5005D45D.1040302@genband.com> <20120717.141153.46613285253481776.davem@davemloft.net> <500978C7.5050004@genband.com> <50097FBD.9080202@redhat.com> <1342806146.2678.31.camel@bwh-desktop.uk.solarflarecom.com> <5009B186.6000806@genband.com> <1342814473.2678.65.camel@bwh-desktop.uk.solarflarecom.com> <5009ECDF.4090305@genband.com> <500D59BF.9040006@redhat.com> In-Reply-To: <500D59BF.9040006@redhat.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Sender: linux-pci-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On 07/23/2012 08:03 AM, Don Dutile wrote: > On 07/20/2012 07:42 PM, Chris Friesen wrote: >> >> I actually have a use-case where the guest needs to be able to modify >> the MAC addresses of network devices that are actually VFs. >> >> The guest is bonding the network devices together, so the bonding >> driver in the guest expects to be able to set all the slaves to the >> same MAC address. >> >> As I read the ixgbe driver, this should be possible as long as the >> host hasn't explicitly set the MAC address of the VF. Is that correct? >> >> Chris > > Interesting tug of war: hypervisors will want to set the macaddrs for > security reasons, > some guests may want to set macaddr for > (valid?) config reasons. > In our case we have control over both guest an host anyways, so it's less of a security issue. In the general case though I could see it being an interesting problem. Back to the original discussion though--has anyone got any ideas about the best way to trigger runtime creation of VFs? I don't know what the binary APIs looks like, but via sysfs I could see something like echo number_of_new_vfs_to_create > /sys/bus/pci/devices/
/create_vfs Something else that occurred to me--is there buy-in from driver maintainers? I know the Intel ethernet drivers (what I'm most familiar with) would need to be substantially modified to support on-the-fly addition of new vfs. Currently they assume that the number of vfs is known at module init time. Chris