From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Thomas Graf Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH net-next 1/1] net: Support for switch port configuration Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 14:40:27 +0000 Message-ID: <20141215144027.GA21262@casper.infradead.org> References: <20141210165018.GG1863@nanopsycho.orion> <54887CF7.70708@gmail.com> <20141215140749.GB21952@casper.infradead.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: John Fastabend , Jiri Pirko , "netdev@vger.kernel.org" , "stephen@networkplumber.org" , "Fastabend, John R" , "roopa@cumulusnetworks.com" , "sfeldma@gmail.com" , "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" To: "Varlese, Marco" Return-path: Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org On 12/15/14 at 02:29pm, Varlese, Marco wrote: > > All of these are highly generic and should *not* be passed through from user > > space to the driver directly but rather be properly abstracted as Roopa > > proposed. The value of this API is abstraction. > How would you let the user enable/disable features then? For instance, how would the user enable/disable flooding for broadcast packets (BFLOODING) on a given port? What I was proposing is to have a list of attributes (to be added in if_link.h) which can be tuned by the user using a tool like iproute2. What do you propose? Excellent, I agree with what you are saying. What set me off is that the patch does not reflect that yet. Instead, the patch introduces a pure Netlink pass-through API to the driver. I would expect the patch to: 1. Parse the Netlink messages and be aware of individual attributes 2. Validate them 3. Pass the configuration to the driver using an API that can also be consumed from in-kernel users. > I think I have seen Roopa posting his updated ndo patch and getting some feedback by few people already and as long as I will be able to accomplish the use case described here I am happy with his way. I think Roopa's patches are supplementary. Not all switchdev users will be backed with a Linux Bridge. I therefore welcome your patches very much. The overlap is in the ndo. I think both the API you propose and Roopa's bridge code should use the same NDO. > I do not have an example right now of a vendor specific attribute but I was just saying that might happen (i.e. someone will have a feature not implemented by others?). That's fine. Once we have them we can consider adding vendor specific extensions.