On 25 February 2015 at 16:46, Andy Gospodarek [off-list ref] wrote:

On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 03:03:56PM +0100, Andrew Lunn wrote:
[...]

quoted

What we don't want is X chip families and Y different ways to
configure the features. Ideal we want X chip families, and one way to
configure them all.

This statement is really my primary concern.  There is lots of interest
around hardware offload at this point and it seems like there is a risk
that a lack of consistency can create problems.

I think these patches are great as they allow for the programming of the
offload hardware (and it has been pointed out that this drastically
increases performance), but one concern I have with this patch (related
to this) is that I'm not sure there is a major need to create netdevs
automatically if there is not the ability to rx/tx actual frames on
these interfaces.

Since the SoC's NIC is going to handle all packet rx/tx then it seems
like there should be a way to signal between the switching
hardware/driver and the NIC driver.  I'm not sure what the ideal
interface for this is, but maybe there is room in the switchdev infra
add some ops to find a way to make this signalling possible to create
netdevs and allow incoming traffic to be assigned to the appropriate
device.

This is what we have in OpenWrt currently and what Florian was trying
to upstream last time. Please try to see
[PATCH 0/4 net-next] net: phy: add Generic Netlink switch configuration API
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.network/288039
, but be aware it's not a short discussion.

One of the reason for rejecting this patchset was that architecture
wasn't using net devices. So exactly something opposite you tried
suggesting now ;)

-- 
Rafał