From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Amir Vadai Subject: Re: Manual loading of mlx4_en Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2014 13:44:54 +0300 Message-ID: <53D77B26.3070905@mellanox.com> References: <1406627612.4498.16.camel@chaos.site> <53D7748A.6040800@mellanox.com> <20140729123405.6802fbc4@endymion.delvare> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Or Gerlitz , Jack Morgenstein , "David S. Miller" , netdev To: Jean Delvare Return-path: Received: from eu1sys200aog107.obsmtp.com ([207.126.144.123]:58288 "EHLO eu1sys200aog107.obsmtp.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752876AbaG2KpD (ORCPT ); Tue, 29 Jul 2014 06:45:03 -0400 In-Reply-To: <20140729123405.6802fbc4@endymion.delvare> Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On 7/29/2014 1:34 PM, Jean Delvare wrote: > Hi Amir, > > On Tue, 29 Jul 2014 13:16:42 +0300, Amir Vadai wrote: >> On 7/29/2014 12:53 PM, Jean Delvare wrote: >>> I have a usability concern with the mlx4_en ethernet network driver. The >>> module aliases for all the supported devices are on the mlx4_core >>> module, so mlx4_core gets loaded automatically, but mlx4_en does not. I >>> must load mlx4_en manually (kernel 3.12.) >>> >>> May I ask why the mlx4 driver was split into mlx4_core and mlx4_en in >>> the first place? >> Connect-X card can support both Ethernet and Infiniband link layer - you >> can switch between link layers without replacing the hardware. >> >> To prevent code duplication, there is a single lower layer driver - >> mlx4_core and two separate upper layer drivers - mlx4_en and mlx4_ib. >> >> Since kernel 3.13 mlx4_core is loading automatically the upper layer >> driver using request_module(): >> b046ffe net/mlx4_core: Load higher level modules according to ports type > > Many thanks for the fast and detailed answer! I'll go backport this > commit to kernel 3.12 (and 3.0, hopefully it doesn't have too many > dependencies?) > I don't think there is any dependency for that commit. If you're backporting it, also take a small fix to it: f24f790 net/mlx4_core: Load the Eth driver first Amir