Re: Netdev devlink A/B firmware bank selection feature

Hi Andrew,

devlink dev info+flash are implemented to handle 2 banks only. For
instance 'devlink dev info' shows a "running" and "stored" field to
represent the current FW that's running and the inactive FW on the
other bank respectively. There are a few architectures out there with

2 banks but as far I can tell, devlink core only handles 2 bank

cases.

Currently, devlink dev flash does not select the flash bank, it just
passes the image to the driver's flash_update callback and the
driver/firmware then determines where to write it to. I don't intend
on modifying it, instead only expanding on 'devlink dev reload
pci/<bdf> action fw_activate'.

Regards,
Zinc

On Fri, Oct 30, 2026 at 1:19 PM Andrew Lunn [off-list ref] wrote:

On Fri, Oct 30, 2026 at 11:28:52AM -0700, Zhineng Lim wrote:

quoted

Hi Jiri,

I'm from the FBNIC team at Meta, working on firmware and drivers. I
realized that devlink core currently lacks a feature for selecting
which A/B bank to use to activate the firmware, i.e currently we just
have "devlink dev reload pci/<bdf> action fw_activate" to activate a
pending image, or reload a current image if none is pending.

I'm thinking of adding a feature that allows for A/B bank selection,
something like:

Any hardware out there which supports A, B, and C?

quoted

devlink dev reload pci/<bdf> action fw_activate bank active
devlink dev reload pci/<bdf> action fw_activate bank inactive

How does 'devlink dev flash' work? Don't you also need a bank
selection?

Seems like 'devlink dev info' needs to indicate banks?

        Andrew