On Thu, 2021-04-15 at 08:21 -0700, Jakub Kicinski wrote: > On Wed, 14 Apr 2021 23:25:43 -0700 Saeed Mahameed wrote: > > On Tue, 2021-04-13 at 20:44 -0700, Jakub Kicinski wrote: > > > ethtool_link_ksettings *); > > > + void (*get_fec_stats)(struct net_device *dev, > > > + struct ethtool_fec_stats > > > *fec_stats); > > > > why void ? some drivers need to access the FW and it could be an > > old > > FW/device where the fec stats are not supported. > > When stats are not supported just returning is fine. Stats are > initialized to -1, core will not dump them into the netlink message > if driver didn't assign anything. > > > and sometimes e.g. in mlx5 case FW can fail for FW related > > businesses > > :).. > > Can do. I was wondering if the entity reading the stats (from user > space) can do anything useful with the error, and didn't really come > up with anything other than printing an error. Which the kernel can > do as well. OTOH if there are multiple stats to read and one of them > fails its probably better to return partial results than fail > the entire op. Therefore I went for no error - if something fails - > the stats will be missing. > > Does that make any sense? Or do you think errors are rare enough that > it's okay if they are fatal? (with the caveat that -EOPNOTSUPP should > be ignored).
Agreed, Thanks for the explanation but you still need to handle the error internally in the driver, otherwise the command returns garbage or 0 if you didn't check return status.
