Re: [PATCH v1 1/6] staging: qlge: Initialize devlink health dump framework for the dlge driver

[Coiby Xu]

On Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 09:37:04AM +0900, Benjamin Poirier wrote:
> On 2020-10-12 19:24 +0800, Coiby Xu wrote:
> [...]
> > > I think, but didn't check in depth, that in those drivers, the devlink
> > > device is tied to the pci device and can exist independently of the
> > > netdev, at least in principle.
> > >
> > You are right. Take drivers/net/ethernet/mellanox/mlxsw as an example,
> > devlink reload would first first unregister_netdev and then
> > register_netdev but struct devlink stays put. But I have yet to
> > understand when unregister/register_netdev is needed.
>
> Maybe it can be useful to manually recover if the hardware or driver
> gets in an erroneous state. I've used `modprobe -r qlge && modprobe
> qlge` for the same in the past.

Thank you for providing this user case!
> > Do we need to
> > add "devlink reload" for qlge?
>
> Not for this patchset. That would be a new feature.

To implement this feature, it seems I need to understand how qlge work
under the hood. For example, what's the difference between
qlge_soft_reset_mpi_risc and qlge_hard_reset_mpi_risc? Or should we use
a brute-force way like do the tasks in qlge_remove and then re-do the
tasks in qlge_probe? Is a hardware reference manual for qlge device?

--
Best regards,
Coiby