From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: "John W. Linville" <linville@tuxdriver.com>
Subject: Re: [patch net-next RFC 0/4] introduce infrastructure for support of
 switch chip datapath
Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2014 16:38:30 -0400
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Cc: Stephen Hemminger <stephen@networkplumber.org>,
	Scott Feldman <sfeldma@cumulusnetworks.com>,
	Andy Gospodarek <andy@greyhouse.net>,
	Roopa Prabhu <roopa@cumulusnetworks.com>,
	Jamal Hadi Salim <jhs@mojatatu.com>,
	Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli@gmail.com>,
	Neil Horman <nhorman@tuxdriver.com>,
	Thomas Graf <tgraf@suug.ch>, netdev <netdev@vger.kernel.org>,
	David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>,
	dborkman <dborkman@redhat.com>, ogerlitz <ogerlitz@mellanox.com>,
	jesse <jesse@nicira.com>, pshelar <pshelar@nicira.com>,
	azhou <azhou@nicira.com>, Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk>,
	jeffrey.t.kirsher@intel.com, vyasevic <vyasevic@redhat.com>,
	Cong Wang <xiyou.wangcong@gmail.com>,
	John Fastabend <john.r.fastabend@intel.com>,
	Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>,
	Lennert Buytenhek <buytenh@wantstofly.org>,
	Shrijeet Mukherjee <shm@cumulusnetworks.com>
To: Jiri Pirko <jiri@resnulli.us>
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On Wed, Apr 02, 2014 at 10:23:18PM +0200, Jiri Pirko wrote:
> Wed, Apr 02, 2014 at 10:04:37PM CEST, stephen@networkplumber.org wrote:
> >On Wed, 2 Apr 2014 15:29:15 -0400
> >"John W. Linville" <linville@tuxdriver.com> wrote:
> >
> >> I've seen the 'ethtool -S' example before and I guess it is valid.
> >> Still, is it worth the confusion of having a mostly useless/unique
> >> netdev just to reuse an ethtool ioctl?  Maybe, I guess...?
> >
> >ethtool is actually the most worthless part of the API.
> >It can't be monitored, is ioctl based but and the statistics are device
> >dependent making them useless for monitoring applications.
> 
> Has anyone actually been thinking about converting ethtool functionality
> to netlink as well? I did some time ago. Most of it should be easy (more or less)
> to do I believe.

Seems like a good idea...but only if you promise to have it primarily
accessed by a tool with a 2-letter name! :-)

-- 
John W. Linville		Someday the world will need a hero, and you
linville@tuxdriver.com			might be all we have.  Be ready.