Cathy Zhou wrote:
> Erik Nordmark wrote:
>> Sebastien Roy wrote:
>>
>>> Interfaces
>>> ==========
>>>
>>> - mac_fastpath_disable()/mac_fastpath_enable() (Consolidation
>>> Private)
>>
>> Why can't those be project private? Presumably no MAC driver other
>> that softmac should ever use this.
>>
> These are not used by softmac driver. They are used by mac clients. At
> this point only the vnic driver will need to call these functions. But
> it could be used by any MAC clients that don't work with fast-path.
So the mac clients need to be aware of fast path? That sounds rather
unfortunate -- given that the ultimate goal is to expose the mac client
API someday. It seems like the details of this should be an
implementation detail, that mac clients don't have to worry about.
Perhaps more clearly, I don't want MAC clients to fail to function
correctly if they don't enable this behavior.
I'd rather have an explicit "enable" that is used by fast-path aware
clients (probably only the IP stuff), and let all other clients
automatically start without fast path enabled. That way if someone
writes a mac client that doesn't know about fastpath, it will at least
function properly.
(Yes, I still believe that this whole fastpath mechanism is essentially
a performance hack to work around a few crufty drivers that really
should be updated to be pure GLDv3 drivers instead of moving this cruft
into the framework. But on the assumption that we're going to move
forward with this, lets at least limit the visibility of this API to
minimize its architectural impact on the system.)
-- Garrett
