From: Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@vyatta.com>
To: Ben Hutchings <bhutchings@solarflare.com>
Cc: Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>, NetDev <netdev@vger.kernel.org>,
David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Subject: Re: the future of ethtool
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2010 12:44:28 -0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20101115124428.7b857ccb@nehalam> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1289852326.2586.32.camel@bwh-desktop>
On Mon, 15 Nov 2010 20:18:46 +0000
Ben Hutchings <bhutchings@solarflare.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-11-15 at 14:41 -0500, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> > Thanks for accepting ethtool maintainership.
> >
> > There are two key unresolved issues with ethtool that are worth noting
> > to the next maintainer. Both of these come from years of user and
> > customer complaints.
> >
> > 1) ethtool command line interface.
> >
> > For 1,001 minor reasons of user taste and expectation, people tend to
> > complain about the command line interface. Due to script usage it is
> > set in stone, and has been since before my tenure. But users
> > continually request something more flexible, often, in particular,
> > wanting to set multiple settings in one execution, or wanting to apply
> > the same setting to multiple interface in one execution.
> >
> > Obviously one can script this, but, it is probably the #1 user request.
>
> Thinking further along those lines, it would be useful to have ethtool
> API bindings for Perl/Python/whatever, though those belong outside of
> the current ethtool package. I tried doing that for use in my own
> scripts and it looks reasonably practical, though I'm not volunteering
> to maintain such bindings.
>
> > My thought was to create "nictool", a new tool with more flexible
> > command line interface, using the same old ethtool ioctls currently in
> > use today. ('nictool' also solves a minor naming complaint from
> > wireless and other people, who use ethtool on non-ethernet network
> > interfaces)
>
> I agree, some of the ethtool operations are very Ethernet-specific but
> enough of them are applicable to other media that this makes sense.
>
> I've recently been looking at FreeBSD where the sort of configuration we
> do through ethtool is invoked through ifconfig, but then ifconfig is
> effectively deprecated on Linux...
>
> > 2) multiple settings and the ethtool kernel interface
> >
> > Another common complaint is related to multiple settings, and associated
> > hardware NIC resets.
> >
> > Many ethtool driver implementations look like this:
> >
> > ethtool_op_do_something()
> > stop RX/TX
> > apply settings
> > perform full NIC reset, consuming much time
> > start RX/TX
> >
> > The problem arises when the user wishes to change multiple hardware
> > attributes at the same time. A user wishing to change 4 attributes
> > could wind up with 4 ethtool(1) invocations, with 4 accompanying
> > hardware NIC resets. Time consuming, inefficient, and unnecessary.
>
> Right. In fact the begin() and complete() operations look like they
> were meant to support this sort of optimisation. Is that the case?
>
> Ben.
>
> > Obviously the world has not ended without these changes, but these items
> > do cause continued complaints from users, and we're here to be
> > responsive to users presumably ;-)
>
>
My views are simple:
Ethtool needs to be an extension of existing netlink API for interfaces.
- handles multiple values per transaction
- extensible
Someone has to write good libraries to access netlink from Perl/Python/C++.
The best so far is libmnl.
--
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2010-11-15 20:44 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 14+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2010-11-15 19:41 the future of ethtool Jeff Garzik
2010-11-15 20:18 ` Ben Hutchings
2010-11-15 20:44 ` Stephen Hemminger [this message]
2010-11-15 21:14 ` Ben Hutchings
2010-11-15 21:14 ` Stephen Hemminger
2010-11-15 21:52 ` Ben Hutchings
2010-11-15 22:49 ` Jeff Garzik
2010-11-15 23:33 ` Thomas Graf
2010-11-16 0:07 ` Jeff Garzik
2010-11-16 0:10 ` Ben Hutchings
2010-11-16 6:25 ` Thomas Graf
2010-11-16 2:02 ` David Miller
2010-11-16 6:17 ` Thomas Graf
2010-11-15 21:03 ` Jeff Garzik
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