DSA is by nature the support for a switch fabric, which can be composed of a single, or multiple interconnected Ethernet switch chips.
The current DSA core behavior is to identify the slave port targeted by a request (e.g. adding a VLAN entry), and program the switch chip to which it belongs accordingly. This is problematic in a multi-chip environment, since all chips of a fabric must be aware of most configuration changes. Here are some concrete examples in a 3-chip environment: [CPU].................... (mdio) (eth0) | : : : _|_____ _______ _______ [__sw0__]--[__sw1__]--[__sw2__] | | | | | | | | | v v v v v v v v v p1 p2 p3 p4 p5 p6 p7 p8 p9 If you add a VLAN entry on p7, sw2 gets programmed, but frames won't reach the CPU interface in a VLAN filtered setup. sw0 and sw1 also need to be programmed. The same problem comes with MAC addresses (FDB, MDB), or ageing time changes for instance. This patch series uses the notification chain introduced for bridging, to notify not only bridge, but switchdev attributes and objects events to all switch chips of the fabric. An ugly debug message printing the ignored event and switch info in the code handling the switch VLAN events would give us: # bridge vlan add dev p7 vid 42 sw0: ignoring DSA_NOTIFIER_VLAN_ADD for sw2 (prepare phase) sw1: ignoring DSA_NOTIFIER_VLAN_ADD for sw2 (prepare phase) sw0: ignoring DSA_NOTIFIER_VLAN_ADD for sw2 (commit phase) sw1: ignoring DSA_NOTIFIER_VLAN_ADD for sw2 (commit phase) To achieve that, patches 1-8 change the scope of the bridge and switchdev callbacks from the DSA slave device to the generic DSA port, so that the port-wide API can be used later for switch ports not exposed to userspace, such as CPU and DSA links. Patches 9-15 move the DSA port specific functions in a new port.c file. Patches 16-20 introduce new events to notify the fabric about switchdev attributes and objects manipulation. This patch series only adds the plumbing to support a distributed configuration, but for the moment, each switch chip ignores events from other chips of the fabric, to keep the current behavior. The next patch series will add support for cross-chip configuration of bridge ageing time, VLAN and MAC address databases operations, etc. Vivien Didelot (20): net: dsa: change scope of STP state setter net: dsa: change scope of notifier call chain net: dsa: change scope of bridging code net: dsa: change scope of FDB handlers net: dsa: change scope of MDB handlers net: dsa: change scope of VLAN handlers net: dsa: change scope of VLAN filtering setter net: dsa: change scope of ageing time setter net: dsa: move port state setters net: dsa: move bridging routines net: dsa: move VLAN filtering setter net: dsa: move ageing time setter net: dsa: move FDB handlers net: dsa: move MDB handlers net: dsa: move VLAN handlers net: dsa: move notifier info to private header net: dsa: add notifier for ageing time net: dsa: add FDB notifier net: dsa: add MDB notifier net: dsa: add VLAN notifier include/net/dsa.h | 10 -- net/dsa/Makefile | 2 +- net/dsa/dsa_priv.h | 83 +++++++++++++ net/dsa/port.c | 260 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ net/dsa/slave.c | 354 +++++------------------------------------------------ net/dsa/switch.c | 175 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 6 files changed, 547 insertions(+), 337 deletions(-) create mode 100644 net/dsa/port.c -- 2.13.0