Certain drivers may need to send management traffic to the switch for
things like register access, FDB dump, etc, to accelerate what their
slow bus (SPI, I2C, MDIO) can already do.
Ethernet is faster (especially in bulk transactions) but is also more
unreliable, since the user may decide to bring the DSA master down (or
not bring it up), therefore severing the link between the host and the
attached switch.
Drivers needing Ethernet-based register access already should have
fallback logic to the slow bus if the Ethernet method fails, but that
fallback may be based on a timeout, and the I/O to the switch may slow
down to a halt if the master is down, because every Ethernet packet will
have to time out. The driver also doesn't have the option to turn off
Ethernet-based I/O momentarily, because it wouldn't know when to turn it
back on.
Which is where this change comes in. By tracking NETDEV_CHANGE,
NETDEV_UP and NETDEV_GOING_DOWN events on the DSA master, we should know
the exact interval of time during which this interface is reliably
available for traffic. Provide this information to switches so they can
use it as they wish.
An helper is added dsa_port_master_is_operational() to check if a master
port is operational.
Signed-off-by: Vladimir Oltean <vladimir.oltean@nxp.com>
Signed-off-by: Ansuel Smith <ansuelsmth@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
295ab96f47