Re: RFC: Use of devlink/health report for non-Ethernet devices

[Ray Jui <ray.jui@broadcom.com>]

Hi Jiri,

On 2020-02-03 10:48 p.m., Jiri Pirko wrote:
> Tue, Feb 04, 2020 at 12:01:37AM CET, ray.jui@broadcom.com wrote:
>> Hi Jiri/Eran/David,
>>
>> I've been investigating the health report feature of devlink, and have a
>> couple related questions as follows:
>>
>> 1. Based on my investigation, it seems that devlink health report mechanism
>> provides the hook for a device driver to report errors, dump debug
>> information, trigger object dump, initiate self-recovery, and etc. The
>> current users of health report are all Ethernet based drivers. However, it
>> does not seem the health report framework prohibits the use from any
>> non-Ethernet based device drivers. Is my understanding correct?
> 
> The whole devlink framework is designed to be independent on
> ethernet/networking.
> 
> 

Great. This is what I thought it is. Thanks for confirming.

>>
>> 2. Following my first question, in this case, do you think it makes any sense
>> to use devlink health report as a generic error reporting and recovery
>> mechanism, for other devices, e.g., NVMe and Virt I/O?
> 
> Sure.
> 
> 

Thanks.

>>
>> 3. In the Ethernet device driver based use case, if one has a "smart NIC"
>> type of platform, i.e., running Linux on the embedded processor of the NIC,
>> it seems to make a lot of sense to also use devlink health report to deal
>> with other non-Ethernet specific errors, originated from the embedded Linux
>> (or any other OSes). The front-end driver that registers various health
>> reporters will still be an Ethernet based device driver, running on the host
>> server system. Does this make sense to you?
> 
> Should not be ethetnet based driver. You should create the devlink
> instance in a driver for the particular device you want to report
> the health for.
> 
> 

Okay thanks!

>>
>> Thanks in advance for your feedback!
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Ray
>>
>>