From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: John Fastabend Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH v0 1/2] net: bridge: propagate FDB table into hardware Date: Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:52:55 -0800 Message-ID: <4F3407F7.9000202@intel.com> References: <20120209032206.32468.92296.stgit@jf-dev1-dcblab> <20120208203627.035c6b0e@nehalam.linuxnetplumber.net> <4F34042F.6090806@intel.com> <20120209094047.3ea7aa56@nehalam.linuxnetplumber.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: bhutchings@solarflare.com, roprabhu@cisco.com, netdev@vger.kernel.org, mst@redhat.com, chrisw@redhat.com, davem@davemloft.net, gregory.v.rose@intel.com, kvm@vger.kernel.org, sri@us.ibm.com To: Stephen Hemminger Return-path: In-Reply-To: <20120209094047.3ea7aa56@nehalam.linuxnetplumber.net> Sender: kvm-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org On 2/9/2012 9:40 AM, Stephen Hemminger wrote: > On Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:36:47 -0800 > John Fastabend wrote: > >> But the device features makes it easy for user space to learn that the device >> supports this sort of offload. Now if all SR-IOV devices support this then it >> doesn't matter but I thought there were SR-IOV devices that didn't do any >> switching? I'll dig through the SR-IOV drivers to check there are not too >> many of them. > > If user space needs to know then the OS is not designed properly. > The purpose of the network device is to abstract all those details, and more and more > of them are bleeding through. This makes writing management applications harder and makes > things dependent on features that may or may not be present. The best design is when > the change is invisible. > Agreed. >> By netlink_notifier do you mean adding a notifier_block and using atomic_notifier_call_chain() >> probably in rtnl_notify()? Then drivers could register with the notifier chain with >> atomic_notifier_chain_register() and receive the events correctly. Or did I miss >> some notifier chain that already exists? > > Yes. that is what I mean. The callbacks you need may or may not already be present. OK thanks I'll put together an update here shortly.