On Mon, 4 Mar 2019 04:41:01 +0000, Parav Pandit wrote:

quoted

quoted

$ devlink dev show
pci/0000:05:00.0
subdev/subdev0  

Please don't spawn devlink instances.  Devlink instance is supposed to
represent an ASIC.  If we start spawning them willy nilly for whatever
software construct we want to model the clarity of the ontology will suffer a
lot.  

Devlink devices not restricted to ASIC even though today it is
representing ASIC for one vendor. Today for one ASIC, it already
presents multiple devlink devices (128 or more) for PF and VFs, two
PFs on same ASIC etc. VF is just a sub-device which is well defined
by PCISIG, whereas sub-device is not. Sub-device do consume actual
ASIC resources (just like PFs and VFs), Hence point-(6) of
cover-letter indicate that the devlink capability to tell how many
such sub-devices can be created.

In above example, they are created for a given bus-device following
existing devlink construct.

No, it's not "representing the ASIC for one vendor".  It's how it works
for switches (including mlxsw) and how it was described in the original
cover letter:

    Introduce devlink interface and first drivers to use it
    
    There a is need for some userspace API that would allow to expose things
    that are not directly related to any device class like net_device of
    ib_device, but rather chip-wide/switch-ASIC-wide stuff.

    [...]

We can deviate from the original intent if need be and dilute the
ontology.  But let's be clear on the status quo, please.