Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2017 00:40:14 -0800 From: Stephen Hurd <shurd@sasktel.net> To: Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling@kev009.com>, freebsd-net@freebsd.org Cc: Scott Long <scottl@netflix.com>, Drew Gallatin <gallatin@netflix.com>, Navdeep Parhar <navdeep@chelsio.com>, Oded Shanoon <odeds@mellanox.com>, hps@freebsd.org, Matthew Macy <mmacy@nextbsd.org>, jeb.j.cramer@intel.com, eric.joyner@intel.com, arybchik@freebsd.org, shurd@freebsd.org, Sean Bruno <sbruno@freebsd.org>, George Neville-Neil <gnn@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: RFC: ethctl Message-ID: <b313c70a-dce2-0bb0-4ae2-b3f21f440439@sasktel.net> In-Reply-To: <CAK7dMtCSRu6L67A46FU0eYqJ9=zGdyJPvBXLkL7gKbh=SbZ6cQ@mail.gmail.com> References: <CAK7dMtCSRu6L67A46FU0eYqJ9=zGdyJPvBXLkL7gKbh=SbZ6cQ@mail.gmail.com>
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Kevin Bowling wrote: > I have heard from several vendors the need for a NIC configuration > tool. Chelsio ships a cxgb/cxgbetool in FreeBSD as one example. > There is precedence for some nod toward a basic unified tool in Linux > ethtool. > > From your perspective, > 1) What are the common requirements? > 2) What are specialized requirements? For instance as a full TCP > offload card Chelsio needs things others wont > 3) What should it _not_ do? Several of you have experience doing > Ethernet driver dev on many platforms so we should attempt to avoid > repeating past design mistakes. Regarding #3, the current ethtool nvram access is a very poor match for how nvram is used on Broadcom devices. Treating it as a tree or at least a key/value store would make support a lot easier in the driver. Very little of the nvram contents can be addressed by offset anymore. For firmware upgrades, it's even worse. Newer Broadcom devices need to have the firmware flashed into a staging area, then have the device notified to validate the image before an upgrade is complete. The generic nvram read/write methods can't be used for firmware and a small set of critical configuration data.
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