Re: [PATCH v2 08/16] mlx4_en: Reporting HW revision in ethtool -i

On Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:08:12 +0000
Ben Hutchings [off-list ref] wrote:

On Wed, 2011-03-23 at 15:54 +0000, Yevgeny Petrilin wrote:

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On Wed, 2011-03-23 at 15:10 +0000, Yevgeny Petrilin wrote:

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This is an abuse of the ethtool_drvinfo::driver field.

Your users can use lspci -v, can't they?

I don't think there is a problem here.
We have always reported the HW model via Ethtool, we just expanded

the information

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we provide.
Our users prefer to see the information in ethtool.

Do you mean 'we documented ethtool -i as the way to get hardware
identification'?  That would be a bug in your documentation.

Ben.

This is not what I mean, All the required information can be found in lspci,
There are some requests to see part of this information also via ethtool

As Stephen says, the issue here is consistency between drivers.
Sometimes you just have to say no to customer requests that you abuse a
standard API.

You could perhaps include some sort of hardware type distinction in the
firmware version string, if it doesn't already incorporate that.

The pci info is already in bus_info and that can be used by tools.
Alternatively, many drivers splat revision/config info out to dmesg.