Shalom says: Currently, drivers do not have the ability to skip the firmware version check during their initialization flow. Hence, drivers will always flash a compatible version. This prevents drivers from running the device with a different firmware version for testing and/or debugging purposes. For example, testing a firmware bug fix.
For these situations, the new devlink generic parameter, fw_version_check, gives the ability to skip the version check and allows drivers to run with a different firmware version than what is required by the driver. Patch #1 adds the new parameter to devlink. The other two patches, #2 and #3, add support for this parameter in the mlxsw driver. Shalom Toledo (3): devlink: Add fw_version_check generic parameter mlxsw: core: Reset firmware after flash during driver initialization mlxsw: spectrum: Skip firmware version check based on devlink parameter drivers/net/ethernet/mellanox/mlxsw/core.c | 45 +++++++++++++++++-- drivers/net/ethernet/mellanox/mlxsw/core.h | 2 + drivers/net/ethernet/mellanox/mlxsw/pci.c | 11 +---- .../net/ethernet/mellanox/mlxsw/spectrum.c | 45 +++++++++++++++++++ include/net/devlink.h | 4 ++ net/core/devlink.c | 5 +++ 6 files changed, 98 insertions(+), 14 deletions(-) -- 2.19.1