Re: [RFC] ethtool: Support for driver private ioctl's

[Jose Abreu <Jose.Abreu@synopsys.com>]

Hi Florian,

On 05-04-2018 16:50, Florian Fainelli wrote:
>
> On 04/05/2018 03:47 AM, Jose Abreu wrote:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> I would like to know your opinion regarding adding support for
>> driver private ioctl's in ethtool.
>>
>> Background: Synopsys Ethernet IP's have a certain number of
>> features which can be reconfigured at runtime. Giving you two
>> examples: One of the most recent one is the safety features,
>> which can be enabled/disabled and forced at runtime. Another one
>> is a Flexible RX Parser which can route specific packets to
>> specific RX DMA channels. Given that these are features specific
>> to our IP's it would not be useful to add an uniform API for this
>> because the users would only be one or two drivers ...
> Parsing of packets and directing the matched packets to specific
> queues/channels can be done through ethtool rxnfc API, tc/cls_flower as
> well, so you should really check whether those APIs don't already allow
> you to do what you want.

Hmm, but in our case this is directly done by HW, we just have to
program a kind of a table which will route automatically the
packets. Does this API support this?

>
> ethtool already supports a concept of private  flags, not ioctl() though
> which allows you to toggle boolean values for instance (or technically
> up to how many bits a "flag" is used to represent) is that enough or do
> you need to turn on/off the feature as well as pass configuration
> parameters?

Some of them I can just turn on/off but the remaining need
configuration and sometimes the configuration is extensive (like
in the case of RX Parser when we have to pass the routing table).

>
>> This new feature would change the help usage for ethtool so that
>> each driver private option would be shown, and then each driver
>> specific file would have a structure with all the available
>> options. Finally, each driver would have to handle the private
>> IOCTL's.
>>
>> We already have this working locally and now I would like to know
>> your opinion about upstreaming this ... Do you think this can be
>> useful for anyone else? Or should we change direction to use, for
>> example, debugfs/configfs?
> In general, even if there is only one driver implementing a particular
> feature, the approach chosen is to come up with an API that is as
> generic as possible. Even if there is a single user of that API in tree,
> having something that was thought to be generic is better than allowing
> uncontrolled private ioctl() implementations.

I understand your point of view but this seems like an overkill
to the -net subsystem because its specific to our IP, or are you
just mentioning a new ethtool entry? i.e. adding a new #define to
the list, plus -net handling ...

Thanks and Best Regards,
Jose Miguel Abreu