On Mon,  7 May 2018 15:10:44 -0700
Sridhar Samudrala [off-list ref] wrote:

This provides a generic interface for paravirtual drivers to listen
for netdev register/unregister/link change events from pci ethernet
devices with the same MAC and takeover their datapath. The notifier and
event handling code is based on the existing netvsc implementation.

It exposes 2 sets of interfaces to the paravirtual drivers.
1. For paravirtual drivers like virtio_net that use 3 netdev model, the
   the failover module provides interfaces to create/destroy additional
   master netdev and all the slave events are managed internally.
          net_failover_create()
          net_failover_destroy()
   A failover netdev is created that acts a master device and controls 2
   slave devices. The original virtio_net netdev is registered as 'standby'
   netdev and a passthru/vf device with the same MAC gets registered as
   'primary' netdev. Both 'standby' and 'failover' netdevs are associated
   with the same 'pci' device.  The user accesses the network interface via
   'failover' netdev. The 'failover' netdev chooses 'primary' netdev as
   default for transmits when it is available with link up and running.
2. For existing netvsc driver that uses 2 netdev model, no master netdev
   is created. The paravirtual driver registers each instance of netvsc
   as a 'failover' netdev  along with a set of ops to manage the slave
   events. There is no 'standby' netdev in this model. A passthru/vf device
   with the same MAC gets registered as 'primary' netdev.
          net_failover_register()
          net_failover_unregister()

Signed-off-by: Sridhar Samudrala <sridhar.samudrala@intel.com>

You are conflating the net_failover device (3 device model) with
the generic network failover infrastructure into one file. There should be two
seperate files net/core/failover.c and drivers/net/failover.c which splits
the work into two parts (and acts a check for the api).