On Mon, 17 Jul 2017 12:52:17 -0700, Felix Manlunas wrote: > From: VSR Burru <veerasenareddy.bu...@cavium.com> > > This patch adds support to create a virtual ethernet interface to > communicate with Linux on LiquidIO adapter for management. > > Signed-off-by: VSR Burru <veerasenareddy.bu...@cavium.com> > Signed-off-by: Srinivasa Jampala <srinivasa.jamp...@cavium.com> > Signed-off-by: Satanand Burla <satananda.bu...@cavium.com> > Signed-off-by: Raghu Vatsavayi <raghu.vatsav...@cavium.com> > Signed-off-by: Felix Manlunas <felix.manlu...@cavium.com>
Not my call, but I have mixed feelings about this one. Is there any precedent under drivers/net/ethernet of exposing special communication channels with FW like this? It's irrelevant to me that you're running SSH, arbitrary communication with FW from userspace is not something netdev community usually accepts. And I'm afraid what the effects will be of this getting accepted. I'm pretty sure most modern network adapters have management CPU cores perfectly capable of running Linux. I know NFP does, here is the out-of-tree code equivalent to this patch: https://github.com/Netronome/nfp-drv-kmods/blob/master/src/nfpcore/nfp_net_vnic.c I'm not looking forward to a world where I have to ssh into my NIC and run vendor commands to configure things.
