Re: [PATCH 1/4] sas: add flag for locally attached PHYs

Christoph Hellwig
2005-10-20T15:49:50Z

<lots of useless rants snipped>

Yes, we have two cases, local phy and phy on an expander. The proper
way to support remote phys is via smp passthru as we hopefully agree.
Right now the sas transport class doesn't do smp passthru (although
I'm working on it) so we only implement local link stats. Once we have
smp passthru we can support link stats, in one of two ways:

- do it in userland as in your example program. in that case we don't
need to do anything in kernel land and need the local_attached flag
to disable this functionality for expander phys.
- do it in kernel, in which case the transport class must call the smp
passthru entry point of the driver to query link stats, so it needs
the local_attached flag aswell for that.

What's your problem with the flag now?