RE: [RFC] ethtool: Display reg dump length via get driver info.

______________________________________
From: Ben Hutchings [bhutchings@solarflare.com]
Sent: Friday, March 18, 2011 4:32 PM
To: Khaparde, Ajit
Cc: netdev@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [RFC] ethtool: Display reg dump length via get driver info.

On Fri, 2011-03-18 at 16:06 -0500, Ajit Khaparde wrote:

quoted

Devices like BE store Reg Dump Data in the hardware.

Where else would it be?

Well yes. That's true.

quoted

This change will allow to just peek into the hardware
to see if any data is available for a dump and analysis,
without actually dumping the register data.

[...]

This is wrong.  ethtool_ops::get_regs_len really should return a
constant, otherwise ethtool (and the kernel) cannot allocate a buffer of
the right size.  If the size of a dump really does vary then make it
return the maximum possible size for the device.

Yes, it is a constant size. And will always be the max size possible.
I just want to see if I can get the length, without really making the ethtoool -d call.
Because that will trigger the dump too.
At that moment, I may not be interested in the data itself.

-Ajit

Ben.

--
Ben Hutchings, Senior Software Engineer, Solarflare
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