On Wednesday 10 September 2014 07:33 AM, Jamal Hadi Salim wrote:

On 09/09/14 11:19, Santosh Shilimkar wrote:

quoted

All the documentation is open including packet accelerator offload
in ti.com.

Very nice.
Would you do me a kindness and point to the switch interface
documentation (and other ones on that soc)?

You can find it here [1], [2], [3]

quoted

We got such requests from customers but couldn't
support it for Linux.

It has been difficult because every chip vendor is trying
to do their own thing. Some have huge (fugly) SDKs in user space
which make it worse. Thats the struggle we are trying to
deal with. Of course none of those vendors want to open
up their specs. You present a nice opportunity to not follow
that path.

quoted

We are also looking for such
support and any direction are welcome. Your slide
deck seems to capture the key topics like L2/IPSEC
offload which we are also interested to hear.

The slides list the most popular offloads. But not necessarily
all known offloads.

quoted

Just to be clear, your point was about L2 switch offload
which the driver don't support at the moment. It might confuse
others. The driver doesn't implements anything non-standard.

If i understood you correctly:
Your initial patches dont intend to expose any offloads - you are just
abstracting this as a NIC. I think that is a legit reason.

Yes. The NetCP hardware is abstracted as a regular NIC.

However, the problem is you are also exposing the packet processors
and switch offloading in a proprietary way.
For a sample of how L2 basic functions like FDB tables are controlled
within a NIC - take a look at the Intel NICs.
Either that or you hide all the offload interfaces and over time add
them (starting with L2 - NICs with L2 are common).

Switch offload isn't supported but we do agree that for packet
accelerator, we are using custom hooks because of lack of other
mechanism.

We will definitely use the new ndo based fdb offload scheme when
we get to it. We understand that the forward direction is to
have ndo operation based offloads and its the right way probably.

We will update the patch and drop all the custom exports. Anyway
the current driver doesn't support any offloads now. We can add
support for it as the frameworks evolves.

Thanks a lot for informative discussion and those links.

Regards,
Santosh
[1] http://www.ti.com/lit/pdf/sprugv9
[2] http://www.ti.com/lit/pdf/spruhj5
[3] http://www.ti.com/lit/pdf/sprugs4