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

[Ray Jui]

Hi Jiri,

On 2020-02-03 10:48 p.m., Jiri Pirko wrote:
> 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.

Great. This is what I thought it is. Thanks for confirming.

> > 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.

Thanks.

> > 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.

Okay thanks!

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