On Thu, 22 Jun 2017 17:28:25 +0300, Or Gerlitz wrote: > On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 12:42 PM, Jakub Kicinski <kubak...@wp.pl> wrote: > > > Let me try to describe it a bit more instead. Sorry but I'm not great > > at ASCII art at this level of complexity and while having to stay > > within 80 chars ;) > > > > Driver communicates with the Management FW via a mailbox. > > > > Driver loads, it gets the Application FW from disk. It pushes the > > entire FW to the mailbox and tells the Management FW to load it. At > > this point the PCIe datapath is loaded and driver discovers what > > other communication channels are available. > > > > Driver checks which FW is loaded and finds appropriate nfp_app callbacks > > for that FW. If the nfp_app requires control message channel it will > > map the control message queue/vNIC. Driver spawn netdevs for > > data vNICs. Flower nfp_app may upon init spawn physical port > > representors (single NFP chip supports tens of ports so they are not > > all guaranteed a full vNIC in many designs). Whenever representor is > > spawned Application FW is notified with a control message. > > > > When user enables SR-IOV nfp_app sriov callback will be invoked and > > flower nfp_app will respond by spawning VF reprs. First version of the > > Flower APP targets only the switchdev mode. We plan to add legacy mode > > and automatically pre-populate the rules if there is user interest. > > Although I personally hope that people interested in legacy SR-IOV will > > use our simpler CoreNIC app FW... Flower APP will initially come up in > > switchdev mode, no rules installed, all traffic will simply end up at > > representors. > > This is much clearer now, thanks for explaining that over. Will be happy > if you can elaborate a bit on the automatic tables pre-population for > legacy mode emulation, sounds interesting.
Oh, I just meant that if someone wants to switch between legacy and switchdev mode without changing the app FW - driver could hide the representors and populate MAC/VLAN forwarding rules to get the same behaviour as "legacy" cards have.
