Date:	Thu, 1 Oct 2015 11:15:36 -0400
From:	Vivien Didelot <vivien.didelot@...oirfairelinux.com>
To:	Scott Feldman <sfeldma@...il.com>
Cc:	Jiri Pirko <jiri@...nulli.us>, Netdev <netdev@...r.kernel.org>,
	Ido Schimmel <idosch@...lanox.com>, eladr@...lanox.com,
	Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli@...il.com>,
	Guenter Roeck <linux@...ck-us.net>,
	"Rosen, Rami" <rami.rosen@...el.com>,
	Roopa Prabhu <roopa@...ulusnetworks.com>,
	Premkumar Jonnala <pjonnala@...adcom.com>,
	"andrew@...n.ch" <andrew@...n.ch>,
	Andy Gospodarek <gospo@...ulusnetworks.com>,
	Jiri Pirko <jiri@...lanox.com>
Subject: Re: [patch net-next v3 02/10] switchdev: introduce transaction item
 queue for attr_set and obj_add

Hi,

On Sep. Wednesday 30 (40) 09:27 PM, Scott Feldman wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 11:56 AM, Vivien Didelot
> <vivien.didelot@...oirfairelinux.com> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > On Sep. Friday 25 (39) 11:03 AM, Vivien Didelot wrote:
> >> On Sep. Thursday 24 (39) 10:55 PM, David Miller wrote:
> >> > From: Scott Feldman <sfeldma@...il.com>
> >> > Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2015 22:29:43 -0700
> >> >
> >> > > I'd rather keep 2-phase not optional, or at least make it some what of
> >> > > a pain for drivers to opt-out of 2-phase.  Forcing the driver to see
> >> > > both phases means the driver needs to put some code to skip phase 1
> >> > > (and hopefully has some persistent comment explaining why its being
> >> > > skipped).  Something like:
> >> > >
> >> > > /* I'm skipping phase 1 prepare for this operation.  I have infinite hardware
> >> > >  * resources and I'm not setting any persistent state in the driver or device
> >> > >  * and I don't need any dynamic resources from the kernel, so its impossible
> >> > >  * for me to fail phase 2 commit.  Nothing to prepare, sorry.
> >> > >  */
> >> >
> >> > I agree with Scott here.
> >> >
> >> > If you can opt out of something, you can not think about it and thus
> >> > more likely get it wrong.
> >> >
> >> > I can just see a driver not implementing prepare at all and then doing
> >> > stupid things in commit when they hit some resource limit or whatever,
> >> > rather than taking care of such issues in prepare.
> >>
> >> OK, I have no experience with stacked devices nor what it actually looks
> >> like, but I understand that it is a redundant setup where it makes sense
> >> to ensure that an operation is feasible before programming the hardware.
> >>
> >> I agree with both of you on imposing switchdev drivers such notion.
> >>
> >> I was confused with the rtnl lock (from bridge netlink requests) which
> >> seemed to limit a lot the usage of this prepare phase.
> >>
> >> I don't know the batch mode neither, but I can think about a potentially
> >> powerful usage of the prepare phase in Marvell switches (or any basic
> >> home router switches), please tell me if the following is feasible:
> >>
> >> Every hardware VLANs I know of are programmed with all port membership
> >> in one shot. This is not feasible today with the bridge command. If I
> >> could bundle in one request the equivalent of ("VID 100: 0u 1u 5t"):
> >>
> >>     bridge vlan add master dev swp0 vid 100 pvid untagged
> >>     bridge vlan add master dev swp1 vid 100 pvid untagged
> >>     bridge vlan add master dev swp5 vid 100 # cpu
> >>
> >> In such case the prepare phase could be great to allocate and populate a
> >> VLAN entry structure (i.e. struct mv88e6xxx_vtu_stu_entry) before
> >> programming the hardware *just once*. Is that doable?
> >
> > May I get answers for this? I'd need that in order to suggest a next
> > step for the prepare phase in DSA drivers.
> 
> You know we're just making this all up as we go, right?  ;)
> 
> Actually, bringing real-world examples us think about solutions, so thank you.

Sorry for the pushing, I'm a little too enthusiast with the ongoing
support for Ethernet switch chips :)

> 
> A partial answer to your question, I guess, is to consider
> switchdev_port_obj_add(dev, obj), which is basically:
> 
>    switchdev_port_obj_add(dev, obj)
>        dev->ops->switchdev_port_obj_add(dev, obj, PREPARE)
>        if no err
>            dev->ops->switchdev_port_obj_add(dev, obj, COMMIT)
>        else
>            // abort transaction
> 
> Seems you could make a batch version that iterates over list of devs
> to add the same obj:
> 
>    switchdev_port_obj_add_batch(devs, obj)
>        for dev in devs:
>            dev->ops->switchdev_port_obj_add(dev, obj, PREPARE)
>        if no errs:
>            for dev in devs:
>                dev->ops->switchdev_port_obj_add(dev, obj, COMMIT)
>        else
>            // abort transaction (on all devs)
> 
> Who calls this _batch version with a list of devs is TBD.   Not sure
> if you can get the -batch and -force options in iproute2 ip cmd to get
> you here.
> 
> And as I look back at your example, you really have two diff objs in
> your cmd list.  First obj is vlan 100 pvid untagged, second obj is
> vlan 100.  Would this be two batches?  Oh, hmmm, maybe the batch
> version iterates over list of {dev, obj} tuples.

Exactly. A list a {dev, obj} tuples would indeed be the key to bring
efficient hardware access, when a user wants to program a switch through
a Linux bridge.

> Something like (sorry, my pseudo code is turning into python):
> 
>    switchdev_port_obj_add_batch(dev_objs)
>        for dev, obj in dev_objs.items:
>            dev->ops->switchdev_port_obj_add(dev, obj, PREPARE)
>        if no errs:
>            for dev, obj in dev_objs.items:
>                dev->ops->switchdev_port_obj_add(dev, obj, COMMIT)
>        else
>            // abort transaction (on all devs)
> 
> Does this help?  Maybe we should walk before running and focus on
> getting non-batch ops working and then revisit?

I agree. I understand the need for a prepare phase, but it looks like it
exists for specific combinations, i.e. stacked and bonded devices.

For basic Ethernet switch chips (even DSA), it is *for the moment* a bit
too unnecessarily complex.

What I will suggest next, is to explicitly skip the prepare phase in DSA
(with a good comment as you already suggested), and fix switchdev to
allow drivers to return -EOPNOTSUPP from its commit phase.

I hope we can agree that asking the hardware "do you support this
object?", and offering the driver a nice preparation framework, are two
different things that switchdev_port_{obj_add,attr_set} accomplish.

Thanks for feeding this thread!
-v
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