RE: [PATCH v2 08/16] mlx4_en: Reporting HW revision in ethtool -i

[Ben Hutchings <bhutchings@solarflare.com>]

On Wed, 2011-03-23 at 15:54 +0000, Yevgeny Petrilin wrote:
> > On Wed, 2011-03-23 at 15:10 +0000, Yevgeny Petrilin wrote:
> > > >
> > > > This is an abuse of the ethtool_drvinfo::driver field.
> > > >
> > > > Your users can use lspci -v, can't they?
> > > >
> > > I don't think there is a problem here.
> > > We have always reported the HW model via Ethtool, we just expanded
> > the information
> > > we provide.
> > > Our users prefer to see the information in ethtool.
> > 
> > Do you mean 'we documented ethtool -i as the way to get hardware
> > identification'?  That would be a bug in your documentation.
> > 
> > Ben.
> 
> This is not what I mean, All the required information can be found in lspci,
> There are some requests to see part of this information also via ethtool

As Stephen says, the issue here is consistency between drivers.
Sometimes you just have to say no to customer requests that you abuse a
standard API.

You could perhaps include some sort of hardware type distinction in the
firmware version string, if it doesn't already incorporate that.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings, Senior Software Engineer, Solarflare
Not speaking for my employer; that's the marketing department's job.
They asked us to note that Solarflare product names are trademarked.