From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Andy Gospodarek Subject: Re: [PATCH] net: phy: b53: switchdev driver for Broadcom BCM53xx switches Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2015 10:46:07 -0500 Message-ID: <20150225154607.GD1332@gospo.home.greyhouse.net> References: <1424799727-30946-1-git-send-email-zajec5@gmail.com> <20150224223039.GC1332@gospo.home.greyhouse.net> <54ED017E.6000902@gmail.com> <20150225001534.GB15633@lunn.ch> <54ED19AB.7020003@gmail.com> <20150225140356.GB17992@lunn.ch> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: Rafa?? Mi??ecki , Florian Fainelli , "David S. Miller" , Network Development , Jonas Gorski , Hauke Mehrtens , Felix Fietkau , Jiri Pirko To: Andrew Lunn Return-path: Received: from mail-qg0-f46.google.com ([209.85.192.46]:38792 "EHLO mail-qg0-f46.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753173AbbBYPqM (ORCPT ); Wed, 25 Feb 2015 10:46:12 -0500 Received: by mail-qg0-f46.google.com with SMTP id z107so3600801qgd.5 for ; Wed, 25 Feb 2015 07:46:11 -0800 (PST) Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20150225140356.GB17992@lunn.ch> Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 03:03:56PM +0100, Andrew Lunn wrote: [...] > > What we don't want is X chip families and Y different ways to > configure the features. Ideal we want X chip families, and one way to > configure them all. This statement is really my primary concern. There is lots of interest around hardware offload at this point and it seems like there is a risk that a lack of consistency can create problems. I think these patches are great as they allow for the programming of the offload hardware (and it has been pointed out that this drastically increases performance), but one concern I have with this patch (related to this) is that I'm not sure there is a major need to create netdevs automatically if there is not the ability to rx/tx actual frames on these interfaces. Since the SoC's NIC is going to handle all packet rx/tx then it seems like there should be a way to signal between the switching hardware/driver and the NIC driver. I'm not sure what the ideal interface for this is, but maybe there is room in the switchdev infra add some ops to find a way to make this signalling possible to create netdevs and allow incoming traffic to be assigned to the appropriate device.