Re: [PATCH 1/3] ethtool: Support ETHTOOL_GSTATS2 command.

[Ben Greear <greearb-my8/4N5VtI7c+919tysfdA@public.gmane.org>]

On 04/22/2018 11:54 AM, David Miller wrote:
> From: Johannes Berg <johannes-cdvu00un1VgdHxzADdlk8Q@public.gmane.org>
> Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2018 17:26:57 +0200
>
>> On Thu, 2018-04-19 at 08:25 -0700, Ben Greear wrote:
>>>
>>> Maybe this could be in followup patches?  It's going to touch a lot of files,
>>> and might be hell to get merged all at once, and I've never used spatch, so
>>> just maybe someone else will volunteer that part :)
>>
>> I guess you'll have to ask davem. :)
>
> Well, first of all, I really don't like this.
>
> The first reason is that every time I see interface foo become foo2,
> foo3 is never far behind it.
>
> If foo was not extensible enough such that we needed foo2, we beter
> design the new thing with explicitly better extensibility in mind.
>
> Furthermore, what you want here is a specific filter.  Someone else
> will want to filter on another criteria, and the next person will
> want yet another.
>
> This needs to be properly generalized.
>
> And frankly if we had moved to ethtool netlink/devlink by now, we
> could just add a netlink attribute for filtering and not even be
> having this conversation.

Well, since there are un-defined flags, it would be simple enough to
extend the API further in the future (flag (1<<31) could mean expect
more input members, etc.  And, adding up to 30 more flags to filter on different
things won't change the API and should be backwards compatible.

But, if you don't want it, that is OK by me, I agree it is a fairly
obscure feature.  It would have saved me time if you had said you didn't
want it at the first RFC patch though...

Thanks,
Ben

-- 
Ben Greear <greearb-my8/4N5VtI7c+919tysfdA@public.gmane.org>
Candela Technologies Inc  http://www.candelatech.com