Re: [RFC PATCH 0/9] ethtool netlink interface (WiP)

[David Miller]

From: Jiri Pirko <jiri@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2017 17:32:46 +0100

> I think that it does not make sense to convert ethtool->netlink_ethtool
> 1:1 feature wise. Now we have devlink, ritch switch representation
> model, tc offload and many others. Lot of things that are in
> ethtool, should be done in devlink. Also, there are couple of things
> that should just die - nice example is ethtool --config-ntuple - we
> should use tc for that.

Whilst I do agree that devlink is probably a good place for this stuff
(we want to be able to do ethetool things on objects that lack a netdev)
I do not agree with the tc angle.

It is entirely appropriate to set the ntuple settings of a driver
without being required to use TC or similar.

All you are going to do with your suggestion is make people keep using
the existing ethtool ioctl, because they'll say "screw this, I'm not
using TC I have something which works just fine already".  And that's
not the goal of putting this stuff into netlink, we want people to
use the new facilities and move off of the ioctl.