Re: [dpdk-dev] BUG - KNI broken in 4.2 kernel

["Zhang, Helin" <helin.zhang@intel.com>]

From: Jay Rolette [mailto:rolette@infiniteio.com]
Sent: Thursday, August 27, 2015 8:49 AM
To: Zhang, Helin
Cc: Stephen Hemminger; dev@dpdk.org
Subject: Re: [dpdk-dev] BUG - KNI broken in 4.2 kernel


On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 10:23 AM, Zhang, Helin <helin.zhang@intel.com<mailto:helin.zhang@intel.com>> wrote:

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stephen Hemminger [mailto:stephen@networkplumber.org<mailto:stephen@networkplumber.org>]
> Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2015 5:15 PM
> To: dev@dpdk.org<mailto:dev@dpdk.org>; Zhang, Helin
> Subject: BUG - KNI broken in 4.2 kernel
>
> The network device ops handles changed again.
>
> Does KNI really need to keep yet another copy of the Intel driver code.
Yes, it is a bit ugly. But there is no better way till now, as some of users want to have the functionality of KNI ethtool though limited now.
I have an idea that is to disable KNI ethtool support by default, as most of users may not care about it. Then these users will not be bothered by these type of issues.

Do you know of anyone that uses KNI that doesn't care about it? Since KNI presents as a normal network interface, it really needs to support the normal Linux commands (ifconfig, ethtool, ...)

Based on my experience, only one or two users asked for ethtool support, then we have it. Before that time, we don’t have KNI ethtool support.
I did not mean who uses KNI does not care about it, I mean for those users who don’t use KNI, they shouldn’t be bothered by the KNI compilation issues. That’s why I was thinking if we can disable it by default, but not remove it.

Regards,
Helin

Jay

For those users who are using KNI ethtool support, they need to fix the issues on any new versions of kernel or similar.
Any good ideas or comments?

Helin

> There already are 4 versions:
>   1. Out-of tree base driver
>   2. In-kernel mainline Linux driver
>   3. DPDK driver
>   4. KNI DPDK driver
>
> No wonder they can't stay in sync.