Hi! This series is the second step to allow trouble shooting and recovering devices in bad state without the use of netdevs as handles. We can already query FW versions over devlink, now we add the ability to update the FW. This will allow drivers to implement some from of "limp-mode" where the device can't really be used for networking and hence has no netdev, but we can interrogate it over devlink and fix the broken FW.
Small but nice advantage of devlink is that it only holds the devlink instance lock during flashing, unlike ethtool which holds rtnl_lock(). Sending as RFC due to impending conflicts. Jakub Kicinski (3): devlink: add flash update command ethtool: add compat for flash update nfp: devlink: allow flashing the device via devlink .../net/ethernet/netronome/nfp/nfp_devlink.c | 47 +++++++++++++- include/net/devlink.h | 11 ++++ include/uapi/linux/devlink.h | 6 ++ net/core/devlink.c | 61 +++++++++++++++++++ net/core/ethtool.c | 12 +++- 5 files changed, 133 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-) -- 2.19.2
