On 19 January 2017 at 19:58, Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowl...@kev009.com> wrote: > Greetings, > > I'm casting a wide net in cc, try to keep the noise minimal but we need > some input from a variety of HW vendors. > > I have heard from several vendors the need for a NIC configuration tool. > Chelsio ships a cxgb/cxgbetool in FreeBSD as one example. There is > precedence for some nod toward a basic unified tool in Linux ethtool. > > From your perspective, > 1) What are the common requirements? > 2) What are specialized requirements? For instance as a full TCP offload > card Chelsio needs things others wont > 3) What should it _not_ do? Several of you have experience doing Ethernet > driver dev on many platforms so we should attempt to avoid repeating past > design mistakes. > > I expect we can achieve some level of inversion so the device specific code > can live close to the driver and plug into the ethctl framework. It should > be general enough to add completely new top level commands, so vendors can > implement HW specific features. On the other hand, we should attempt to > hook into common core for features every NIC provides, with a focus on > iflib. > > I will fund Matt Macy to do the overall design and implementation. > > Regards, > Kevin Bowling, on behalf of Limelight Networks for this effort
Hi, ethtool isn't exactly complicated. It's just vaguely standardized. When I was hoping (hah!) to do it, partly for wifi but partly for ethernet, my goals were: * generic interface for counter statistics, versus sysctl; * "default" mib space for known counter statistics, versus the small set we have now and then the very large vendor space that ethtool (linux) and sysctl (freebsd) exposes; * generic interface for configuring things like RSS mapping, L2/L3 rules for a NIC based on the NIC capability and what queue(s) they map to, versus vendor tools; * vendor specific extensions, which hopefully (!) are implemented as generic-ish plugins where required, or just strings that can be passed through to the driver and registered via a command hook; * and importantly - some kind of optional debug control, because every driver does something different for debugging / tracing, and boy it'd be nice if it all was like wifi (wlandebug -i <interface> +/-(feature)) A lot of what's in linux ethtool is in freebsd's ifconfig, albeit not in a reusable/runtime-extensible fashion. It'd be nice to include say, many more vendor counters in a somewhat generic fashion, versus how we currently do things. I think it'd be a good starting point to have an ethtool control iflib drivers, so any driver using iflib can benefit from what's implemented. 2c, -adrian _______________________________________________ freebsd-net@freebsd.org mailing list https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-net To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-net-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
