On Fri, Feb 27, 2026 at 02:43:46PM +0100, Thomas Monjalon wrote:
> 26/02/2026 17:50, Robin Jarry:
> > David Marchand, Feb 26, 2026 at 17:20:
> > > Some applications use port hotplug as their primary way for using DPDK
> > > resources.
> > > Having a systematic device probing is a problem when not all available
> > > resources will be used by the application, as such applications won't set
> > > an explicit allow list at startup.
> > >
> > > This is the case for OVS on systems with multiple mlx5 devices:
> > > one device can be used by the kernel while the other(s) are used by DPDK.
> > > In such a setup, the kernel used device may get reconfigured in
> > > unexpected ways and trigger issues like the one described by Kevin
> > > not so long ago in bugzilla 1873.
> > >
> > > Add an EAL option so that we can change the default behavior from
> > > block-listing to allow-listing.
> [...]
> > > + const char * const argv29[] = {prgname, prefix, mp_flag, eal_debug_logs,
> > > + "--allow-explicitly" };
> >
> > I am not convinced by the option name. What do you think of:
> >
> > --no-autoprobe
> >
> > That would match the Linux sriov_drivers_autoprobe sysfs.
>
> The name --no-autoprobe is better indeed.
>
> The exact effect of this option is to disable initial probing
> of devices on all buses (except vdev).
> Another name could be --no-initial-probing
>
> I think we should add the opposite option as well
> to allow changing the default mode later.
> For such an option, --autoprobe looks better than --initial-probing.
>
> Other opinions?
>
>
> [...]
> > Depending on what option name we settle on, could you add a short flag
> > too? E.g.:
> >
> > BOOL_ARG("--no-autoprobe", "-N", "Disable automatic probing of non-blocked
> > devices", no_autoprobe)
> >
> > Or:
> >
> > BOOL_ARG("--no-autoprobe", "-P", "Disable automatic probing of non-blocked
> > devices", no_autoprobe)
>
> I don't see the benefit of a short flag.
> It makes reading commands less obvious.
>
I actually would prefer to have a short option available, and I'd really
like that short option to be "-A" since it serves as the perfect addition
to the "-a" flag to specify devices to probe.
Based on that, I would look for long options which allow "-A" as the short
version for example:
--allowlisted-devs-only
/Bruce
