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

Nikolay Aleksandrov
2025-03-12T14:20:10Z

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.

Cheers,
Nik