Wed, Sep 30, 2020 at 03:57:25PM CEST, andrew@lunn.ch wrote:

quoted

I get it. But I as I wrote previously, I wonder if used/unused should
not be another attribute. Then the flavour can be "undefined".

In the DSA world, it is not undefined. It is clear defined as
unused. And it cannot be on-the-fly changed. It is a property of the
PCB, in that the pins exist on the chip, but they simply don't go
anywhere on the PCB. This is quite common on appliances, e.g. The
switch has 7 ports, but the installation in the aircraft is a big
ring, so there is a 'left', 'right', 'aux' and the CPU port. That
leaves 3 ports totally unused.

Understand the DSA usecase.

quoted

But, why do you want to show "unused" ports? Can the user do something
with them? What is the value in showing them?

Because they are just ports, they can have regions. We can look at the

What do you mean by "regions"? Devlink regions? They are per-device, not
per-port. I have to be missing something.

region and be sure they are powered off, the boot loader etc has not
left them in a funny state, bridged to other ports, etc.

It is driver's responsibility to ensure that. But that does not mean
that the devlink port needs to be visible.

Regions are a developers tool, not a 'user' tools. So the idea of
hiding them by default in 'devlink port show' does make some sense,
and have a flag like -d for details, which includes them. In 'devlink
region show' i would probably list all regions, independent of any -d
flag.

     Andrew