Re: [PATCH net-next 03/10] devlink: Serialize access to rate domains

Jiri Pirko
2025-02-27T12:22:32Z

Thu, Feb 27, 2025 at 03:53:10AM +0100, kuba@kernel.org wrote:
>On Wed, 26 Feb 2025 15:44:35 +0100 Jiri Pirko wrote:
>> > Why would there still be PF instances? I'm not suggesting that you
>> > create a hierarchy of instances.
>>
>> I'm not sure how you imagine getting rid of them. One PCI PF
>> instantiates one devlink now. There are lots of configuration (e.g. params)
>> that is per-PF. You need this instance for that, how else would you do
>> per-PF things on shared ASIC instance?
>
>There are per-PF ports, right?

Depends. On normal host sr-iov, no. On smartnic where you have PF in
host, yes.

>
>> Creating SFs is per-PF operation for example. I didn't to thorough
>> analysis, but I'm sure there are couple of per-PF things like these.
>
>Seems like adding a port attribute to SF creation would be a much
>smaller extension than adding a layer of objects.
>
>> Also not breaking the existing users may be an argument to keep per-PF
>> instances.
>
>We're talking about multi-PF devices only. Besides pretty sure we
>moved multiple params and health reporters to be per port, so IDK
>what changed now.

Looks like pretty much all current NICs are multi-PFs, aren't they?