[RFC PATCH net-next 0/4] ethtool: Add ability to flash and query transceiver modules' firmware

From: Ido Schimmel <idosch@nvidia.com>

This patchset extends the ethtool netlink API to allow user space to
both flash transceiver modules' firmware and query the firmware
information (e.g., version, state).

The main use case is CMIS compliant modules such as QSFP-DD. The CMIS
standard specifies the interfaces used for both operations. See section
7.3.1 in revision 5.0 of the standard [1].

Despite the immediate use case being CMIS compliant modules, the user
interface is kept generic enough to accommodate future use cases, if
these arise.

The purpose of this RFC is to solicit feedback on both the proposed user
interface and the device driver API which are described in detail in
patches #1 and #3. The netdevsim patches are for RFC purposes only. The
plan is to implement the CMIS functionality in common code (under lib/)
so that it can be shared by MAC drivers that will pass function pointers
to it in order to read and write from their modules EEPROM.

ethtool(8) patches can be found here [2].

[1] http://www.qsfp-dd.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/CMIS5p0.pdf
[2] https://github.com/idosch/ethtool/tree/submit/module_fw_rfc

Ido Schimmel (4):
  ethtool: Add ability to query transceiver modules' firmware
    information
  netdevsim: Implement support for ethtool_ops::get_module_fw_info
  ethtool: Add ability to flash transceiver modules' firmware
  netdevsim: Implement support for ethtool_ops::start_fw_flash_module

 Documentation/networking/ethtool-netlink.rst | 128 +++++++-
 drivers/net/netdevsim/ethtool.c              | 164 ++++++++++
 drivers/net/netdevsim/netdevsim.h            |  10 +
 include/linux/ethtool.h                      | 109 +++++++
 include/linux/ethtool_netlink.h              |   9 +
 include/uapi/linux/ethtool.h                 |  18 +
 include/uapi/linux/ethtool_netlink.h         |  49 +++
 net/ethtool/module.c                         | 327 +++++++++++++++++++
 net/ethtool/netlink.c                        |  17 +
 net/ethtool/netlink.h                        |   4 +
 10 files changed, 833 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

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2.31.1