[RFC] ethtool: Support for driver private ioctl's

[Jose Abreu <Jose.Abreu@synopsys.com>]

Hi All,

I would like to know your opinion regarding adding support for
driver private ioctl's in ethtool.

Background: Synopsys Ethernet IP's have a certain number of
features which can be reconfigured at runtime. Giving you two
examples: One of the most recent one is the safety features,
which can be enabled/disabled and forced at runtime. Another one
is a Flexible RX Parser which can route specific packets to
specific RX DMA channels. Given that these are features specific
to our IP's it would not be useful to add an uniform API for this
because the users would only be one or two drivers ...

This new feature would change the help usage for ethtool so that
each driver private option would be shown, and then each driver
specific file would have a structure with all the available
options. Finally, each driver would have to handle the private
IOCTL's.

We already have this working locally and now I would like to know
your opinion about upstreaming this ... Do you think this can be
useful for anyone else? Or should we change direction to use, for
example, debugfs/configfs?

Thanks and Best Regards,
Jose Miguel Abreu