RFC: ethctl

[Stephen Hurd]

Kevin Bowling wrote:
> I have heard from several vendors the need for a NIC configuration 
> tool.  Chelsio ships a cxgb/cxgbetool in FreeBSD as one example.  
> There is precedence for some nod toward a basic unified tool in Linux 
> ethtool.
>
> From your perspective,
> 1) What are the common requirements?
> 2) What are specialized requirements? For instance as a full TCP 
> offload card Chelsio needs things others wont
> 3) What should it _not_ do?  Several of you have experience doing 
> Ethernet driver dev on many platforms so we should attempt to avoid 
> repeating past design mistakes.

Regarding #3, the current ethtool nvram access is a very poor match for 
how nvram is used on Broadcom devices.  Treating it as a tree or at 
least a key/value store would make support a lot easier in the driver.  
Very little of the nvram contents can be addressed by offset anymore.

For firmware upgrades, it's even worse.  Newer Broadcom devices need to 
have the firmware flashed into a staging area, then have the device 
notified to validate the image before an upgrade is complete.  The 
generic nvram read/write methods can't be used for firmware and a small 
set of critical configuration data.