Re: [PATCH v1 1/6] staging: qlge: Initialize devlink health dump framework for the dlge driver

On Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 09:37:04AM +0900, Benjamin Poirier wrote:

On 2020-10-12 19:24 +0800, Coiby Xu wrote:
[...]

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I think, but didn't check in depth, that in those drivers, the devlink
device is tied to the pci device and can exist independently of the
netdev, at least in principle.

You are right. Take drivers/net/ethernet/mellanox/mlxsw as an example,
devlink reload would first first unregister_netdev and then
register_netdev but struct devlink stays put. But I have yet to
understand when unregister/register_netdev is needed.

Maybe it can be useful to manually recover if the hardware or driver
gets in an erroneous state. I've used `modprobe -r qlge && modprobe
qlge` for the same in the past.

Thank you for providing this user case!

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Do we need to
add "devlink reload" for qlge?

Not for this patchset. That would be a new feature.

To implement this feature, it seems I need to understand how qlge work
under the hood. For example, what's the difference between
qlge_soft_reset_mpi_risc and qlge_hard_reset_mpi_risc? Or should we use
a brute-force way like do the tasks in qlge_remove and then re-do the
tasks in qlge_probe? Is a hardware reference manual for qlge device?

--
Best regards,
Coiby