Re: [PATCH net-next v2 6/9] net: macsec: hardware offloading infrastructure

Antoine Tenart
2019-08-12T08:15:08Z

Hi Andrew,

On Sat, Aug 10, 2019 at 06:34:23PM +0200, Andrew Lunn wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 08, 2019 at 04:05:57PM +0200, Antoine Tenart wrote:
> > This patch introduces the MACsec hardware offloading infrastructure.
> >
> > The main idea here is to re-use the logic and data structures of the
> > software MACsec implementation. This allows not to duplicate definitions
> > and structure storing the same kind of information. It also allows to
> > use a unified genlink interface for both MACsec implementations (so that
> > the same userspace tool, `ip macsec`, is used with the same arguments).
> > The MACsec offloading support cannot be disabled if an interface
> > supports it at the moment.
> >
> > The MACsec configuration is passed to device drivers supporting it
> > through macsec_hw_offload() which is called from the MACsec genl
> > helpers. This function calls the macsec ops of PHY and Ethernet
> > drivers in two steps
>
> It is great that you are thinking how a MAC driver would make use of
> this. But on the flip side, we don't usual add an API unless there is
> a user. And as far as i see, you only add a PHY level implementation,
> not a MAC level.

That's right, and the only modification here is a simple patch adding
the MACsec ops within struct net_device. I can remove it as we do not
have providers as of now and it can be added easily later on.

Thanks,
Antoine

--
Antoine Ténart, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering