Re: RFC: Use of devlink/health report for non-Ethernet devices

[Jiri Pirko]

Tue, Feb 04, 2020 at 12:01:37AM CET, ray.jui@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>Hi Jiri/Eran/David,
>
>I've been investigating the health report feature of devlink, and have a
>couple related questions as follows:
>
>1. Based on my investigation, it seems that devlink health report mechanism
>provides the hook for a device driver to report errors, dump debug
>information, trigger object dump, initiate self-recovery, and etc. The
>current users of health report are all Ethernet based drivers. However, it
>does not seem the health report framework prohibits the use from any
>non-Ethernet based device drivers. Is my understanding correct?

The whole devlink framework is designed to be independent on
ethernet/networking.


>
>2. Following my first question, in this case, do you think it makes any sense
>to use devlink health report as a generic error reporting and recovery
>mechanism, for other devices, e.g., NVMe and Virt I/O?

Sure.


>
>3. In the Ethernet device driver based use case, if one has a "smart NIC"
>type of platform, i.e., running Linux on the embedded processor of the NIC,
>it seems to make a lot of sense to also use devlink health report to deal
>with other non-Ethernet specific errors, originated from the embedded Linux
>(or any other OSes). The front-end driver that registers various health
>reporters will still be an Ethernet based device driver, running on the host
>server system. Does this make sense to you?

Should not be ethetnet based driver. You should create the devlink
instance in a driver for the particular device you want to report
the health for.


>
>Thanks in advance for your feedback!
>
>Thanks,
>
>Ray
>
>