Re: [PATCH v2 00/17] octeontx2-af: NPC parser and NIX blocks initialization

On Fri, Oct 26, 2018 at 7:34 PM Arnd Bergmann [off-list ref] wrote:

On 10/26/18, Sunil Kovvuri [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Fri, Oct 26, 2018 at 6:24 PM Arnd Bergmann [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

I see this has been applied, but I'd still like to understand better how
the
configuration interface is expected to work once the driver is complete.

In particular, so far the interfaces all assume that configuration is
done through the mailbox between PCI devices, which could be done
from a virtual machine kernel with access to PCI, or through the use
of VFIO from a user application.

Is that the only method of configuring it that you support, or will there
also be a devlink based interface or something like that to configure
the aspects of a virtual device that should not be accessible to the
VF itself?

As of now it's only mbox based configuration that is supported.

Ok, thanks for the clarification.

Does this mean that you intend to have user space tools that use
the mbox based interface on VFIO devices to perform configuration
for virtual network devices, or just that the configuration interface
is something that needs to be designed later?

No there is no need for any userspace tools.
It's the virtual network device's driver which will send commands
like resource allocation, configuration, stats retrieval to this
AF device via mbox interface.

eg: A user using ethtool changes RSS settings for the network device,
network device's driver receives the data, prepares a mailbox command
sends it to this driver for configuring the same in HW.

Thanks,
Sunil.