Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next 00/10] NCSI Support

From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 07 Jul 2016 19:17:36 +1000

On Thu, 2016-07-07 at 12:12 +0300, Or Gerlitz wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 5, 2016 at 8:44 PM, Alexei Starovoitov
> <[email-masked]> wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 04, 2016 at 01:03:06AM +0300, Or Gerlitz wrote:
> 
> > Or, since cx4 has ncsi as well, could you do a thorough review of this
> > to make sure that it fits mellanox nics as well?
> 
> Hi Alexei, all
> 
> Yuval from our team who deals with host management did review on the
> series, SB his feedback.
> 
> 1. The initialization uses a single unicast MAC address which hints it
> assumes that the management traffic is IPv4 only. The infrastructure
> does not seem to be ready for IPv6 based management traffic.

You mean the transfer of the MAC address from the BMC to the NIC for
filtering incoming traffic ?

> 2. The code enables AEN messages (all the 3 messages defined by the
> standard are enabled). AEN support mandates readiness on the BMC side
> (running the reviewed code) and mandates support on the NIC. Not every
> NIC can create AEN messages therefore I would recommend that the code
> will only enable AENs which are declared as supported. To query
> support for AEN messages, the BMC shall interpret the response for
> "Get Capabilities" command and based on the returned response it can
> detect which AEN message is supported by the NIC and may be enabled.

Ok.

> 3. When stating support for NC-SI it is important to indicate which
> exact version of NC-SI is supported (or required). From my observation
> this code is based on NC-SI 1.0.0 as it does not use any of the
> features which were introduced in the later versions.

Probably correct, 1.0.1 I think is the only one that was available when
we started that work. I found 1.1.0 on the DMTF web site, are you aware
of anything more recent ?

Gavin, you can get it here:

 https://www.dmtf.org/sites/default/files/standards/documents/DSP0222_1.1.0.pdf

> 4. HW arbitration is disabled in this implementation. It should be
> defined how to add support to system which supports HW arbitration.
> 
> 5. The code has an initialization sequence which is clear. Yet there
> shall be a re-initialization sequence needed if a device goes through
> asynchronous entry to initial state, which may happen if the NIC goes
> through reset for any reason.

Ok.

Gavin: We can discuss these tomorrow if you need.

Cheers,
Ben.