Re: [PATCH 1/2] net: Add layer 2 hardware acceleration operations for macvlan devices

From: Neil Horman <nhorman@tuxdriver.com>
Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 17:20:00 -0400

Thats me experimenting.  I was thinking that origionally this functionality
might be grouped separately, so that we could handle it independently of the
standard network device operations (you might have noticed in v1 of my patch I
had a size_t variable in there, so I thought the separation might be
organizationally nice).  It was also something I was tinkering with for
potential future work to support other data plane accelerators (like the FM6000
switch chip from intel) in a manner that didn't pollute the more typical host network
devices.  Like I said though, just experimenting at the moment....

Can these dataplane devices still act like a normal networking port and
send and receive packets at the host level?

If yes, that would be an extremely strong argument for netdev_ops.