Re: [RFC PATCH 00/13] Ultra Ethernet driver introduction

Stanislav Fomichev
2025-03-14T20:51:35Z

On 03/12, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 12, 2025 at 04:20:08PM +0200, Nikolay Aleksandrov wrote:
> > On 3/12/25 1:29 PM, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
> > > On Wed, Mar 12, 2025 at 11:40:05AM +0200, Nikolay Aleksandrov wrote:
> > >> On 3/8/25 8:46 PM, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
> > >>> On Fri, Mar 07, 2025 at 01:01:50AM +0200, Nikolay Aleksandrov wrote:
> > [snip]
> > >> Also we have the ephemeral PDC connections>> that come and go as
> > needed. There more such objects coming with more
> > >> state, configuration and lifecycle management. That is why we added a
> > >> separate netlink family to cleanly manage them without trying to fit
> > >> a square peg in a round hole so to speak.
> > >
> > > Yeah, I saw that you are planning to use netlink to manage objects,
> > > which is very questionable. It is slow, unreliable, requires sockets,
> > > needs more parsing logic e.t.c
> > >
> > > To avoid all this overhead, RDMA uses netlink-like ioctl calls, which
> > > fits better for object configurations.
> > >
> > > Thanks
> >
> > We'd definitely like to keep using netlink for control path object
> > management. Also please note we're talking about genetlink family. It is
> > fast and reliable enough for us, very easily extensible,
> > has a nice precise object definition with policies to enforce various
> > limitations, has extensive tooling (e.g. ynl), communication can be
> > monitored in realtime for debugging (e.g. nlmon), has a nice human
> > readable error reporting, gives the ability to easily dump large object
> > groups with filters applied, YAML family definitions and so on.
> > Having sockets or parsing are not issues.
>
> Of course it is issue as netlink relies on Netlink sockets, which means
> that you constantly move your configuration data instead of doing
> standard to whole linux kernel pattern of allocating configuration
> structs in user-space and just providing pointer to that through ioctl
> call.

And you still call copy_from_user on that user-space pointer. So how
is it an improvement over netlink? netlink is just a flexible tlv,
if you don't like read/write calls, we can add netlink_ioctl with
a pointer to netlink message...