Date:   Thu, 6 Jul 2017 18:53:42 +0000
From:   Casey Leedom <leedom@...lsio.com>
To:     Jakub Kicinski <kubakici@...pl>,
        Dustin Byford <dustin@...ulusnetworks.com>
CC:     Andrew Lunn <andrew@...n.ch>,
        Roopa Prabhu <roopa@...ulusnetworks.com>,
        "davem@...emloft.net" <davem@...emloft.net>,
        "linville@...driver.com" <linville@...driver.com>,
        "netdev@...r.kernel.org" <netdev@...r.kernel.org>,
        "vidya.chowdary@...il.com" <vidya.chowdary@...il.com>,
        "olson@...ulusnetworks.com" <olson@...ulusnetworks.com>,
        Manoj Malviya <manojmalviya@...lsio.com>,
        Santosh Rastapur <santosh@...lsio.com>,
        "yuval.mintz@...gic.com" <yuval.mintz@...gic.com>,
        "odedw@...lanox.com" <odedw@...lanox.com>,
        "ariela@...lanox.com" <ariela@...lanox.com>,
        "galp@...lanox.com" <galp@...lanox.com>,
        "jeffrey.t.kirsher@...el.com" <jeffrey.t.kirsher@...el.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next 1/3] net: ethtool: add support for forward error
 correction modes

| From: Jakub Kicinski <kubakici@...pl>
| Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2017 6:00 PM
|     
| On Wed, 28 Jun 2017 14:47:51 -0700, Dustin Byford wrote:
| > 
| > You're not the first, or the second to ask that question.  I agree it
| > could use clarification.
| > 
| > I always read auto in this context as automatic rather than autoneg.
| > The best I can come up with is to perhaps fully spell out "automatic" in
| > the documentation and the associated uapi enums.  It's accurate, and
| > hopefully different enough from "autoneg" to hint people away from the
| > IEEE autoneg concept.
| 
| So perhaps just "default"?  Even saying something like ieee-selected
| doesn't really help, because apparently there are two autonegs defined
| - IEEE one and a "consortium" one...

First, sorry for the extreme delay in responding.  I was at the {25,100}Gb/s Ethernet "Plug Fest" all last week and then the holiday weekend added to the delay.

As Dustin notes, you're not the first to be confused by the use of the term "auto".  It absolutely means.  It essentially means: "Use standard FEC settings as specified by IEEE 802.3 interpretations of Cable Transceiver Module parameters."  But this is quite a mouthful.  In this sense, "auto" means "automatic".

Other keywords which we bandied about included: standard, default, ieee, ieee802.3, ieee802.3-default, transceiver-default, etc.  As you can see, the quest to make the option more obvious lead to increasing verbosity.

I think that in the end, we decided to go with a moderately short keyword with tons of documentation to make the meaning clear.

By the way, this isn't the end of this problem.  The new QSFP28 and SFP28 Port Types have introduced a problem which no one has ever seen with any preceding network technology.  With all previous networking technologies, a driver could look at an adapter Port Type and know what its Port Capabilities were in terms of Speeds, etc. and those Port Capabilities would never change.  With the new QSFP28 and SFP28 Port Types, the Physical Port Capabilities can change based on what Transceiver Modules you plug in.  For instance, with one QSFP28 Transceiver Module you might see {100,50,25}Gb/s and with a different one {40,10}Gb/s.  One Transceiver Module might support Reed-Solomon Forward Error Correction and another might also support BaseR/Reed-Solomon.

For the proposed FEC controls, we've tried to cope with this by having this "Automatic IEEE802.3 Transceiver Module-dictated FEC" via the "auto" selection (where most users will leave it we hope).  This allows the Firmware/Host Driver to automatically track the FEC needs of the currently plugged in Transceiver Module.

However, the first question which pops up is: what happens if a user explicitly selects a particular FEC for from the set offered by the current Transceiver Module, and then swap out Transceiver Modules to one which doesn't support that FEC?  Does the OS/Driver/Firmware "forget" the user's FEC setting?  Does it respect it and potentially not get a link established?  Do we "temporarily" put the user's FEC setting aside?  Or do we have FEC settings per-Transceiver Module Type?  Each choice has downsides in terms of "expected behavior" and the complexity of the abstraction model offered to the user.

In our discussions of the above, we decided that we should err in the direction of the absolutely simplest abstraction model, even when that might result in a failure to establish a link.  Our feeling was that doing anything else would result in endless user confusion.  Basically, if it takes longer than a simple paragraph to explain, you're probably doing the wrong thing.  So, we decided that if a user sets up a particular FEC setting, we keep that regardless of conflict with different Transceiver Modules.  (But flag such issues in the System Log in order to try to give the user a chance to understand what the new cable they plugged in wasn't working.)

As noted above, the "auto" FEC setting solves the problem of automatically tracking the FEC needs of whatever Transceiver Module happens to be plugged in.

And now with QSFP28 and SFP28, we have the same issue with possible Speeds (and other Link Parameters).  It may well be that we're going to need to extend this idea into Link Speeds.

Casey

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