Re: [PATCH net-next] net: dsa: lantiq_gswip: Add support for dumping the registers

[Florian Fainelli]

On 4/13/2021 12:25 PM, Martin Blumenstingl wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 13, 2021 at 1:45 AM Andrew Lunn <andrew@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> [...]
>>>> and a few people have forked it and modified it for other DSA
>>>> switches. At some point we might want to try to merge the forks back
>>>> together so we have one tool to dump any switch.
>>> actually I was wondering if there is some way to make the registers
>>> "easier to read" in userspace.
>>
>> You can add decoding to ethtool. The marvell chips have this, to some
>> extent. But the ethtool API is limited to just port registers, and
>> there can be a lot more registers which are not associated to a
>> port. devlink gives you access to these additional registers.
> oh, then that's actually also a problem with my patch:
> the .get_regs implementation currently also uses five registers which
> are not related to the specific port.
> noted in case I re-send this as .get_regs patch instead of moving over
> to devlink.

In premise there is nothing that prevents you from returning the port
registers as well as the global registers for any .get_regs() call. This
is not really beautiful or clean but as far as register dumping goes it
would get the job done. devlink is better organized in that you can dump
global and per-port registers and they show up as separate regions.
--
Florian