Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next v2 2/4] swdevice: add new api to set and del bridge port attributes

From: Jamal Hadi Salim <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 18:27:30 -0500

On 12/15/14 13:36, Arad, Ronen wrote:
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----

> The behavior of a driver could depend on the presence of a bridge and features such as FDB LEARNING and LEARNING_SYNC.

Indeed, those are bridge attributes.

> A switch port driver which is not enslaved to a bridge might need to implement VLAN-aware FDB
>within the driver and report its content to user-space using ndo_fdb_dump.
 >
> A switch port driver which is enslaved to a bridge could do with only pass through for static FDB configuration
 > to the HW when LEARNING_SYNC is configured. FDB reporting to 
user-space and soft aging are left to the bridge module FDB.
> Such driver, without LEARNING_SYNC could still avoid maintaing in-driver FDB as long as it could dump the HW FDB on demand.
> LEARNING_SYNC also requires periodic updates of freshness information from the driver to the bridge module.
>

If you have an fdb - shouldnt that be exposed only if you have a bridge
abstraction exposed? i.e thats where the Linux tools would work.
What i was refering to was a scenario where i have no interest in the
fdb despite such a hardware capabilities. VLANs is a different issue;

>>> Will the decision about using a bridge device or avoiding it be left
>>> to the end-user?
>>
>> Its a user policy decision. Again the offload bit gets us this in a reasonably
>> configurable way IMO.
>>
>>> (This requires switch port drivers to be able to work and provide
>>> similar functionality in both setups).
>>
>> Right, but if the drivers "care" who is calling their ndo ops something is
>> seriously broken. For the driver it should not need to know anything about
>> the callers so it doesn't matter to the driver if its a netlink call from user
>> space or an internal call fro bridge.ko
>
> LEARNING_SYNC only makes sense when a switch port driver is enslaved to a bridge.
 > Rocker switch driver indeed monitors upper change notifications and 
keep track of master bridge presence.
> So bridge presence is not transparent.
>

Agreed - the challenge so far is that people have been fascinated by
"switch" point of view. I think we are learning and the class device
will eventually become obvious as useful.

cheers,
jamal