Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next v2 12/14] sfc: set EF100 VF MAC address through representor

From: Jakub Kicinski <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2022 18:45:27 -0700

On Thu, 28 Jul 2022 21:23:23 +0100 Edward Cree wrote:
> Sadly I was too busy with EF100 bring-up, and naïvely assumed that I
>  could safely ignore devlink port stuff as it was so obviously going
>  to be a classic Mellanox design: tasteless, overweight, and not
>  cleanly mappable onto any other vendor.  Which seems to have been
>  true but they've managed to make it the standard anyway by virtue
>  of being there first, as usual :'(
> (Yeah, I probably shouldn't publicly say things like that about
>  another vendor's devs.  But I'm getting frustrated at this recurring
>  pattern.)

I spend an unhealthy amount of time thinking about the problem 
of vendors not paying attention when new uAPIs are forged.
Happy to try things.

> Devlink port function *would* be useful for administering functions
>  that don't have a representor.  I just can't see any good reason
>  why such things should ever exist.

The SmartNIC/DPU/IPU/isolated hv+IO CPU can expose storage functions
to the peer. nVidia is working on extending the devlink rate limit API
to cover such cases.