netdev - Re: DSA vs. SWTICHDEV ?

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Date:   Wed, 30 Nov 2016 14:30:43 +0000
From:   Joakim Tjernlund <Joakim.Tjernlund@...inera.com>
To:     "andrew@...n.ch" <andrew@...n.ch>
CC:     "netdev@...r.kernel.org" <netdev@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: DSA vs. SWTICHDEV ?

On Wed, 2016-11-30 at 14:52 +0100, Andrew Lunn wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 30, 2016 at 08:50:34AM +0000, Joakim Tjernlund wrote:
> > I am trying to wrap my head around these two "devices" and have a hard time telling them apart.
> > We are looking att adding a faily large switch(over PCIe) to our board and from what I can tell
> > switchdev is the new way to do it but DSA is still there. Is it possible to just list
> > how they differ?
> 
> Hi Joakim

Hi Andrew, thanks for answering

> 
> If the interface you use to send frames from the host to the switch is
> PCIe, you probably want to use switchdev directly.

OK, we will have a few ethernet I/F's connected too but I these should be used
as normal interfaces just interfacing a switch.

> 
> DSA devices all use a host Ethernet interface to send frames to the
> switch. DSA sits under switchdev, and effectively provides a lot of
> the common stuff needed for implementing switch drivers of this
> sort. It creates the slave interfaces, links the MAC to the PHY, has
> one uniform device tree binding which all DSA switches have, deals
> with encapsulation/decapsulating frames sent over the master device,
> etc.

And switchdev can do all this over PCIe instead? Can you have a switch tree in switchdev too?

We probably need to push a custom tag for final step (after the switch) and I think that
should be doable with a custom VLAN driver over one/several of switchdev's virtual
interfaces? 

 Joakim