Re: [RFC PATCH] virtio_net: Extend virtio to use VF datapath when available

On Tue, Dec 19, 2017 at 10:41 AM, Stephen Hemminger <
stephen@networkplumber.org> wrote:

On Tue, 19 Dec 2017 13:21:17 -0500 (EST)
David Miller [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

From: Stephen Hemminger <stephen@networkplumber.org>
Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2017 09:55:48 -0800

quoted

could be 10ms, just enough to let udev do its renaming

Please, move to some kind of notification or event based handling of
this problem.

No delay is safe, what if userspace gets swapped out or whatever
else might make userspace stall unexpectedly?

The plan is to remove the delay and do the naming in the kernel.
This was suggested by Lennart since udev is only doing naming policy
because kernel names were not repeatable.

This makes the VF show up as "ethN_vf" on Hyper-V which is user friendly.

Patch is pending.

While it's good to show VF with specific naming to indicate enslavement, I
wonder wouldn't it be better to hide this netdev at all from the user
space? IMHO this extra device is useless when being enslaved and we may
delegate controls (e.g. ethtool) over to the para-virtual device instead?
That way it's possible to eliminate the possibility of additional udev
setup or modification?

I'm not sure if this  is consistent with Windows guest or not, but I don't
find it _Linux_ user friendly that ethtool doesn't work on the composite
interface any more, and I have to end up with finding out the correct
enslaved VF I must operate on.

Regards,
-Siwei