Subject: Re: [PATCH] net/mlx4_core: print firmware version during driver loading

From: Leon Romanovsky <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2018 11:50:09 +0300

On Fri, Sep 14, 2018 at 03:36:46PM -0700, Qing Huang wrote:
>
>
> On 9/14/2018 2:14 PM, David Miller wrote:
> > From: Qing Huang<[email-masked]>
> > Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2018 11:33:40 -0700
> >
> > > On 9/14/2018 11:17 AM, Andrew Lunn wrote:
> > > > On Fri, Sep 14, 2018 at 10:15:48AM -0700, Qing Huang wrote:
> > > > > The FW version is actually a very crucial piece of information and
> > > > > only
> > > > > printed once here
> > > > > when the driver is loaded. People tend to get confused when switching
> > > > > multiple FW files
> > > > > back and forth without running separate utility tools, especially at
> > > > > customer sites.
> > > > > IMHO, this information is very useful and only takes up very little
> > > > > log file
> > > > > space. :-)
> > > > Why not use ethtool -i ?
> > > >
> > > > $ sudo ethtool -i eth0
> > > > driver: r8169
> > > > version: 2.3LK-NAPI
> > > > firmware-version: rtl8168g-2_0.0.1 02/06/13
> > > >
> > > >       Andrew
> > > Sure. You can also use ibstat or ibv_devinfo tool if they are
> > > installed. But it's not very
> > > convenient in some cases.
> > >
> > > E.g.
> > > A customer upgrades FW on HCAs and encounters issues. During triage,
> > > it's much easier
> > > to study customer uploaded log files when remotely testing different
> > > FW files.
> > Not a valid argument.  You can print the ethtool output from initramfs
> > if necessary for triage.
> >
> > I still stand by the fact that ethtool is the only fully reliable way
> > to obtain this information, the kernel log is not.
>
> This is more for Infiniband mode which depends more on features and
> functionalities

For pure infiniband devices you have rdmatool, part of iproute2.
[leonro@server-14-015 ~]$ rdma dev
1: mlx5_0: node_type ca fw 3.8.9999 node_guid 5254:00c0:fe12:3455 sys_image_guid 5254:00c0:fe12:3455

> provided in firmware and get much more frequent FW bug fixes than typical
> Ethernet
> devices. This is not meant to replace other ways of getting the information,
> more like
> an enhancement for checking log history.
>
> This can provide valuable information when tracing through system log
> history to
> discover what happened with a specific HCA drv ver and fw ver combination in
> the past.
>
> Regards,
> Qing