Re: [PATCH] net: phy: b53: switchdev driver for Broadcom BCM53xx switches

[Jiri Pirko <jiri@resnulli.us>]

Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 08:03:48AM CET, zajec5@gmail.com wrote:
>On 25 February 2015 at 01:39, Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 24/02/15 16:15, Andrew Lunn wrote:
>>> On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 02:55:58PM -0800, Florian Fainelli wrote:
>>>> On 24/02/15 14:50, Rafa?? Mi??ecki wrote:
>>>>> As said in the commit message, these switches are really simple
>>>>> devices. We can't actually send packets to the particular ports
>>>>> (unless something has changed in the more recent hardware).
>>>>
>>>> These switches all support Broadcom tags, so you could use your host CPU
>>>> Ethernet MAC to send/receive packets to/from specific ports of the
>>>> switch, and then this is just like DSA, but everything that you say
>>>> below is true.
>>>
>>> If this hardware does support the concept of tags compatible to the
>>> existing Broadcom Starfighter 2, should we not do that? Is there a
>>> good reason these chips should use a difference abstraction than
>>> Starfighter 2 and the Marvell devices?
>>
>> No, I think that would be a reasonable thing to do, I am still a little
>> unclear how the older BCM5325 and friends work with respect to broadcom
>> tags, but regardless, DSA now understands switches that do not support
>> tags, so we should be good with some sort of b53 library.
>
>DSA doesn't allow me to use switch (hardware) VLANs. I would need to
>handle all forwarding in CPU. The most powerful Broadcom MIPS SoC -
>BCM4706 - can handle about 130 Mb/s. Less powerful - BCM4718A1 - only
>about 50 Mb/s.
>This is way too bad for performance when there is a 1 Gb/s switch and
>too bad for CPU usage.

Please correct me if I'm wrong Florian, but I believe that DSA does
allow setting up chips to do forwarding without packets going to CPU.

b53 looks like it fits nicely into DSA architecture. I believe that it
should be integrated there.

>
>I guess the whole idea of switchdev was to allow what proposed version
>of b53 does? To handle VLANs in hardware.
>
>-- 
>Rafał