On Thu, 2012-08-23 at 06:35 +0000, Huang, Xiong wrote: > > This is why we require that portable, sane, interfaces are added to ethtool > > for > > driver diagnostics. That way users can perform a task in the same way > > regardless of what hardware and driver are underneath. > > I quite agree you on using ethtool to implement it. we did consider it. > But ethtool has some limitation, for example, the NIC has built-in OTP (TWSI > interface) > And Flash (External SPI interface), their properties are quite different > with EEPROM which > Ethtool supports. > To support such memory (OTP/Flash), we need additional input parameters.
You have two reasonable options for this: 1. The ETHTOOL_FLASHDEV command takes a partition ID and filename to write. The driver is supposed to load the file through the firmware loader and then rewrite the partition completely (erasing if necessary). Example: be2net. 2. For a more flexible interface, implement an MTD driver as part of your net driver. Example: sfc. > Same situation exists in diagnostic utility. Ethtool only provide two options > : offline & online > That's too gross to locate which part/module of the chip is malfunction. we > also need > more options to detect it. That's absolute nonsense, you can run as many sub-tests as you want and provide separate results for each of them. Ben. > that's why we finally selected a custom debugfs interface. -- Ben Hutchings, Staff Engineer, Solarflare Not speaking for my employer; that's the marketing department's job. They asked us to note that Solarflare product names are trademarked. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
