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

Andrew Lunn
2019-08-13T16:28:32Z

> 1) With current implementation it's impossible to install SW macsec engine onto
> the device which supports HW offload. That could be a strong limitation in
> cases when user sees HW macsec offload is broken or work differently, and he/she
> wants to replace it with SW one.
> MACSec is a complex feature, and it may happen something is missing in HW.
> Trivial example is 256bit encryption, which is not always a musthave in HW
> implementations.

Ideally, we want the driver to return EOPNOTSUPP if it does not
support something and the software implement should be used.

If the offload is broken, we want a bug report! And if it works
differently, it suggests there is also a bug we need to fix, or the
standard is ambiguous.

It would also be nice to add extra information to the netlink API to
indicate if HW or SW is being used. In other places where we offload
to accelerators we have such additional information.

Andrew