Question about IXGBEVF reset

Hi

I was having a discussion on the IXGBE mailing list regarding RESET due to lost link mailbox message and its handling in DPDK:
http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/intel-wired-lan/Week-of-Mon-20161128/007389.html

I was wondering what can be done regarding this issue. Particularly, the patch
http://dpdk.org/dev/patchwork/patch/14009/
does seem to have an assumption that a link will be up sooner or later.

The problem with that is the link may go down for arbitrarily long time (and the ixgbe driver will issue the reset mailbox message due to ’Tx work pending’). We can call ixgbevf_dev_stop at this point but we cannot safely run ixgbevf_dev_start. Do you have any suggestion how to handle this case? Also, is there any better (more recent) patch to handle this?

Thanks,
Ruslan Nikolaev