Speakers
Description
For a long time now the industry has been building programmable
processors into devices to run firmware code. This is a long standing
design approach going back decades at this point. In some devices the
firmware is effectively a fixed function and has little in the way of
RAS features or configurability. However, a growing trend is to push
significant complexity into these devices processors.
Storage has been doing FW centric devices for a long time now, and we
can see some evolution there where standards based channels exist that
carry device specific data. For instance, looking at nvme-cli we can
see a range of generic channels carrying device specific RAS or
configuration (smart-log, fw-log, error-log, fw-download). nvme-cli
also supports entire device specific extensions to access unique
functionality (nvme-intel- nvme-huawei-, nvme-micro-*)
https://man.archlinux.org/man/community/nvme-cli/nvme.1.en
This reflects the reality that standardization can only go so far.
The large amount of FW code still needs RAS and configuration unique
to each device's design to expose its full capability.
In the NIC world we have been seeing FW centric devices for a long
time, starting with MIPS cores in early Broadcom devices, entire Linux
OS's in early "offload NICs", to today's highly complex NIC focusing on
complicated virtualization scenarios.
For a long time our goal with devlink has been to see a similar
heathly mix of standards based multi-vendor APIs side by side with
device specific APIs, similar to how nvme-clie is handling things on
the storage side.
In this talk, we will explore options, upstream APIs and mainstream
utilities to enjoy FW-centric NIC customizations.
We are focused on:
1) non-volatile device configuration and firmware update - static and
preserved across reboots
2) Volatile device global firmware configuration - runtime.
3) Volatile per-function firmware configuration (PF/VF/SF) - runtime.
4) RAS features for FW - capture crash/fault data, read back logs,
trigger device diagnostic modes, report device diagnostic data,
device attestation
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