Re: [PATCH net-next V4 02/14] documentation: networking: add shared devlink documentation

[Jiri Pirko]

Thu, Dec 04, 2025 at 07:57:37PM +0100, kuba@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>On Wed, 3 Dec 2025 11:36:13 +0100 Jiri Pirko wrote:
>> >To be clear -- I understand how you're laying things out. My point is
>> >not about that. My question is how can user make intuitive sense of this
>> >mess of random object floating around. Every SW engineering problem can
>> >be solved by another layer of abstraction, that's not the challenge. 
>> >The challenge is to design those layers so that they make intuitive
>> >sense (to people who don't spend their life programming against mlx FW
>> >interfaces).  
>> 
>> Well, this really has no relation to mlx FW interfaces. It is a generic
>> issue of having multiple PFs backed by 1 physical device sharing
>> resources. How to make things more intuitive, I don't know :/ Any
>> suggestion?
>
>We're talking in circles. Having a single devlink instance for the
>"1 physical device" is far more intuitive than stringing together
>ports from two devlink instances by using a third instance.

PF is sort of physical device, isn't it? The boundary is just too
fuzzy. In some things the PFs are separate, in other they share
resources.

I guess we don't live in ideal world? Per pf devlink instance
is what we currently have and removing that would be just too
distruptive. I don't know how to do this
differently other than adding shared instance for these N PFs.
Honestly I can't clearly tell what exactly you want :(