[ofa-general] Re: [PATCH v4 14/14] QLogic VNIC: sysfs Documentation

[Patrick McHardy]

Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 11:03:08AM -0700, Roland Dreier wrote:
>>> We have linkstate/operstate for this. How is a user supposed
>>> to configure the network device when it appears at a more or
>>> less random time from his perspective?
>  
>> Well, keep in mind that this driver is for an ethernet virtual NIC
>> that is actually
>> remote across another network (an InfiniBand fabric) -- so these devices
>> can actually appear or disappear at random times by their nature.  It's a
>> similar issue to, say, a USB ethernet adapter presents -- there's no sane way
>> to have operstate set for a device that hasn't been attached yet.
> 
> I think that is only a fair analogy if the VNIC used some kind of
> hot-plug auto discovery procedure like USB does. As soon as you
> require the administrator to run a command to bind a device to a VNIC
> GID you are much more like a tunnel device and the ethernet device
> should exist from the moment the administator creates it up until the
> administator destroys it. The state of the connection to the VNIC
> should be reflected in some way other than device presence.

Fully agreed.