Re: [iproute2-next v1] devlink: display elapsed time during flash update

[Jacob Keller <jacob.e.keller@intel.com>]

On 9/29/2020 3:44 PM, Shannon Nelson wrote:
> On 9/29/20 2:56 PM, Jacob Keller wrote:
>> For some devices, updating the flash can take significant time during
>> operations where no status can meaningfully be reported. This can be
>> somewhat confusing to a user who sees devlink appear to hang on the
>> terminal waiting for the device to update.
>>
>> Recent changes to the kernel interface allow such long running commands
>> to provide a timeout value indicating some upper bound on how long the
>> relevant action could take.
>>
>> Provide a ticking counter of the time elapsed since the previous status
>> message in order to make it clear that the program is not simply stuck.
>>
>> Display this message whenever the status message from the kernel
>> indicates a timeout value. Additionally also display the message if
>> we've received no status for more than couple of seconds. If we elapse
>> more than the timeout provided by the status message, replace the
>> timeout display with "timeout reached".
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Jacob Keller <jacob.e.keller@intel.com>
>> ---
>>
> 
> Thanks, Jake.  In general this seems to work pretty well.  One thing, 
> tho'...
> 
> Our fw download is slow (I won't go into the reasons here) so we're 
> clicking through the Download x% over maybe 100+ seconds.  Since we send 
> an update every 3% or so, we end up seeing the ( 0m 3s ) pop up and stay 
> there the whole time, looking a little odd:
> 
>      ./iproute2-5.8.0/devlink/devlink dev flash pci/0000:b5:00.0 file 
> ionic/dsc_fw_1.15.0-150.tar
>      Preparing to flash
>      Downloading  37% ( 0m 3s )
>    ...
>      Downloading  59% ( 0m 3s )
>    ...
>      Downloading  83% ( 0m 3s )
> 
> And at the end we see:
> 
>      Preparing to flash
>      Downloading 100% ( 0m 3s )
>      Installing ( 0m 43s : 25m 0s )
>      Selecting ( 0m 5s : 0m 30s )
>      Flash done
> 
> I can have the driver do updates more often in order to stay under the 3 
> second limit and hide this, but it looks a bit funky, especially at the 
> end where I know that 100% took a lot longer than 3 seconds.
> 

I think we have two options here:

1) never display an elapsed time when we have done/total information

or

2) treat elapsed time as a measure since the last status message
changed, refactoring this so that it shows the total time spent on that
status message.

Thoughts on this? I think I'm leaning towards (2) at the moment myself.
This might lead to displaying the timing info on many % calculations
though... Hmm

> sln
> 
>