On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 10:33:31AM -0700, Stephen Hemminger wrote: > One of my pet peeve's is that the device driver config does not abstract > the properties of the Ethernet device. The existing parameters match those > of Intel's Ethernet hardware but not much else. It also makes it hard > to write generic applications. If the application has to query the > device driver name string and insert different parameters for igb, igbvf, > ixgbe > and vmxnet3 then the API was designed wrong. > I agree. I think the patches that recently got integrated from Olivier are a step toward fixing that, but theres some more work to be done.
Neil > Specific examples: > * the "descriptors" argument to rx/tx is interpreted as a hardware resource > not the number of packets. An application really wants to say "you may > buffer > up to 100us of packets" not have to guess what the underlying driver does. > > * the rthresh/wthresh/pthresh are PCI device artifacts and correct value is > different for each HW device shouldn't be exposed to application. The API > should be something like "device may burst up to N packets and/or T > latency". > > These seems like issues of a transition from a cool toy to talk to Intel > hardware > to a useful application infrastructure. > > That is why I would hate to see the existing Intel device centric API frozen. >
