On Sep. Thursday 24 (39) 10:55 PM, David Miller wrote:
> From: Scott Feldman <sfel...@gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2015 22:29:43 -0700
>
> > I'd rather keep 2-phase not optional, or at least make it some what of
> > a pain for drivers to opt-out of 2-phase. Forcing the driver to see
> > both phases means the driver needs to put some code to skip phase 1
> > (and hopefully has some persistent comment explaining why its being
> > skipped). Something like:
> >
> > /* I'm skipping phase 1 prepare for this operation. I have infinite
> > hardware
> > * resources and I'm not setting any persistent state in the driver or
> > device
> > * and I don't need any dynamic resources from the kernel, so its impossible
> > * for me to fail phase 2 commit. Nothing to prepare, sorry.
> > */
>
> I agree with Scott here.
>
> If you can opt out of something, you can not think about it and thus
> more likely get it wrong.
>
> I can just see a driver not implementing prepare at all and then doing
> stupid things in commit when they hit some resource limit or whatever,
> rather than taking care of such issues in prepare.
OK, I have no experience with stacked devices nor what it actually looks
like, but I understand that it is a redundant setup where it makes sense
to ensure that an operation is feasible before programming the hardware.
I agree with both of you on imposing switchdev drivers such notion.
I was confused with the rtnl lock (from bridge netlink requests) which
seemed to limit a lot the usage of this prepare phase.
I don't know the batch mode neither, but I can think about a potentially
powerful usage of the prepare phase in Marvell switches (or any basic
home router switches), please tell me if the following is feasible:
Every hardware VLANs I know of are programmed with all port membership
in one shot. This is not feasible today with the bridge command. If I
could bundle in one request the equivalent of ("VID 100: 0u 1u 5t"):
bridge vlan add master dev swp0 vid 100 pvid untagged
bridge vlan add master dev swp1 vid 100 pvid untagged
bridge vlan add master dev swp5 vid 100 # cpu
In such case the prepare phase could be great to allocate and populate a
VLAN entry structure (i.e. struct mv88e6xxx_vtu_stu_entry) before
programming the hardware *just once*. Is that doable?
Also, I insist on removing the assumption that no error can occure
during the commit phase, for 2 reasons:
- errors can actually occure (e.g. MDIO calls).
- it makes no difference to the caller of switchdev_port_attr_set() and
switchdev_port_obj_add() whether the call failed during the prepare
or commit phase.
So I will propose a patch to get rid of the WARN(), if you don't mind.
Finally, what do you think about the snippet I proposed in my mail you
are replying to?
Implementing (now mandatory!) port_obj_prepare and port_attr_prepare
switchdev ops will explicit the prepare phase in drivers, simplify their
code and get rid of the prepare boolean and phase helper functions.
Thanks,
-v
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