From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jose Abreu Subject: [RFC] ethtool: Support for driver private ioctl's Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2018 11:47:28 +0100 Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: , Joao Pinto To: David Miller , Jakub Jelinek , "Jeff Garzik" , Tim Hockin , Eli Kupermann , Chris Leech , "Scott Feldman" , Ben Hutchings Return-path: Received: from smtprelay2.synopsys.com ([198.182.60.111]:44278 "EHLO smtprelay.synopsys.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751097AbeDEKrg (ORCPT ); Thu, 5 Apr 2018 06:47:36 -0400 Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: 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