-----Original Message-----
From: John Fastabend [mailto:john.fastabend@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, June 21, 2013 10:41 PM
To: K, Narendra
Cc: Ben Hutchings; netdev@vger.kernel.org; john.r.fastabend@intel.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next] net: Add phys_port identifier to struct
net_device and export it to sysfs

On 06/19/2013 12:34 PM, Ben Hutchings wrote:

[...]

quoted

I think so.

quoted

If correct,  I think the 'show_broadcast' function also needs to be
fixed as it is not holding the lock.

I think the broadcast address should never change during the lifetime
of a device, so it doesn't need the lock.  That might not be true for
all layer 2 protocols though.

Ben.

Also, do you think this will be primarily useful for partitioning devices that
expose multiple physical functions? Or do you see a use case for SR-IOV with
virtual functions as well. The pyhs_port attribute provides a common
interface for both cases which is good I suppose in the VF case however the
host can already learn this. I gather from your original post here that you are
aware of all this.

John,   I think it will be useful in the SRIOV scenario also when more than one VF from two NICs are assigned to the guest. phys_port would be helpful in choosing the correct slave interfaces when host details are not available.
 
With regards,
Narendra K
Linux Engineering
Dell Inc.