> The driver has a good intimate information of his device > implementation, and hence an analysis done by the device vendor is > favorable.
For a firmware based NIC, maybe. For a discrete NIC, making use of all the Linux subsystems, this is going to be hard from within the kernel. > The driver provider can perform the analysis inside the device (firmware) or > in the driver according to his preferences. > We believe that since devices are becoming smarter, more analysis will be > done by the device itself, which has more > information and faster access. > Smart NICs/SoCs are very popular this days and this API takes into account > the different architectures. > > Since this callback is optional, a user space analysis tool can be added in > the future providing more generic analysis approach for > unsupported devices. I still fear this is going to be an ethtool call with only one user. Andrew
