[OpenWrt-Devel] [PATCH v3 0/6] staging: Introduce DPAA2 Ethernet Switch driver

[Linus Walleij]

Top posting and resending since netdev at vger.kernel.org
is the right mail address for this. Mea culpa.

Linus Walleij

On Sat, Oct 14, 2017 at 11:35 AM, Linus Walleij
<linus.walleij at linaro.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 5, 2017 at 11:16 AM, Razvan Stefanescu
> <razvan.stefanescu at nxp.com> wrote:
>
>> This patchset introduces the Ethernet Switch Driver for Freescale/NXP SoCs
>> with DPAA2 (DataPath Acceleration Architecture v2). The driver manages
>> switch objects discovered on the fsl-mc bus. A description of the driver
>> can be found in the associated README file.
>>
>> The patchset consists of:
>> * A set of libraries containing APIs for configuring and controlling
>>   Management Complex (MC) switch objects
>> * The DPAA2 Ethernet Switch driver
>> * Patch adding ethtool support
>
> So it appears that ethernet switches is a class of device that need their own
> subsystem in Linux, before this driver can move out of staging.
>
> I ran into the problem in OpenWRT that has these out-of-tree patches for
> off-chip ethernet switches, conveniently placed under net/phy:
> https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/tree/master/target/linux/generic/files/drivers/net/phy
>
> These are some 12 different ethernet switches. It is used in more or
> less every home router out there.
>
> It's not really working to have all of this out-of-tree, there must have been
> discussions about the requirements for a proper ethernet switch subsystem.
>
> I'm not a good net developers, just a grumpy user having to deal with all
> of this out-of-tree code that's not helpful with changing interfaces like
> device tree and so on.
>
> Can you people who worked on this over the years pit in with your
> requirements for an ethernet switch subsystem so we can house these
> drivers in a proper way?
>
> What we need AFAICT:
>
> - Consensus on userspace ABI
> - Consensus on ethtool extenstions
> - Consensus on where in drivers/net this goes
>
> You can kick me for not knowing what I'm talking about and how complex the
> problem is now.
>
> Yours,
> Linus Walleij
_______________________________________________
openwrt-devel mailing list
openwrt-devel at lists.openwrt.org
https://lists.openwrt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel