Re: [RFC 0/3] Adding config get/set to devlink

[Jiri Pirko <jiri@resnulli.us>]

Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 04:46:24PM CEST, roopa@cumulusnetworks.com wrote:
>On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 7:40 AM, Jiri Pirko <jiri@resnulli.us> wrote:
>> Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 04:35:10PM CEST, roopa@cumulusnetworks.com wrote:
>>>On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 6:34 AM, Steve Lin <steven.lin1@broadcom.com> wrote:
>>>> Adds a devlink command for getting & setting device configuration
>>>> parameters, and enumerates a bunch of those parameters as devlink
>>>> attributes.  Also introduces an attribute that can be set by a
>>>> driver to indicate that the config change doesn't take effect
>>>> until the next restart (as in the case of the bnxt driver changes
>>>> in this patchset, for which all the configuration changes affect NVM
>>>> only, and aren't loaded until the next restart.)
>>>>
>>>> bnxt driver patches make use of these new devlink cmds/attributes.
>>>>
>>>> Steve Lin (3):
>>>>   devlink: Add config parameter get/set operations
>>>>   bnxt: Move generic devlink code to new file
>>>>   bnxt: Add devlink support for config get/set
>>>>
>>>
>>>Is the goal here to move all ethtool operations to devlink (I saw some
>>>attrs related to speed etc). ?.
>>>We do need to move ethtool attrs to netlink and devlink is a good
>>>place (and of-course leave the current ethtool api around for backward
>>>compatibility).
>>
>> We need to make sure we are not moving things to devlink which don't
>> belong there. All options that use "netdev" as a handle should go into
>> rtnetlink instead.
>>
>
>Any reason you want to keep that restriction ?.
>FWIS, devlink is a driver api just like ethtool is.
>and ethtool needs to move to netlink soon...and It would be better to
>not put the rtnl_lock burden on ethtool driver operations. Instead of
>adding yet another driver api, extending devlink seems like a great
>fit to me.

Hmm, the original purpose of devlink was to obtain iface for things that
could not use "netdev" as a handle. I try to stick with it as we already
have iface for things that could use "netdev" as a handle - rtnetlink.

Not sure we want to go this way and add "netdev"-handle things into
devlink. Thoughts?