On Wed, Jan 13, 2021 at 4:14 AM Jiri Pirko <jiri@resnulli.us> wrote:

> To resolve this, a concept of "provisioning" is introduced.
> The user may "provision" certain slot with a line card type.
> Driver then creates all instances (devlink ports, netdevices, etc)
> related to this line card type. The carrier of netdevices stays down.
> Once the line card is inserted and activated, the carrier of the
> related netdevices goes up.

Do we need to start distinguishing different reasons for carrier down,
or have some kind of device not ready state instead?

I'm facing a similar issue with NIC firmware that isn't yet ready by
device open time, but have been resisting the urge to lie to the stack
about the state of the device and use link state as the next gate.
Sure, most things will just work most of the time, but the problems
with this approach are manifold. Firstly, at least in the NIC case,
the user may confuse this state for some kind of cable issue and go
looking in the wrong place for a solution. But, there are also several
ways the initialization can fail after this point and now the device
is administratively UP, but can never be UP, with no sanctioned way to
communicate the failure. Aren't the issues here similar?

Regards,
Edwin Peer