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John Fastabend authored
Now that dcbnl is being used in many cases by more than a single agent it is beneficial to be notified when some entity either driver or user space has changed the DCB attributes. Today applications either end up polling the interface or relying on a user space database to maintain the DCB state and post events. Polling is a poor solution for obvious reasons. And relying on a user space database has its own downside. Namely it has created strange boot dependencies requiring the database be populated before any applications dependent on DCB attributes starts or the application goes into a polling loop. Populating the database requires negotiating link setting with the peer and can take anywhere from less than a second up to a few seconds depending on the switch implementation. Perhaps more importantly if another application or an embedded agent sets a DCB link attribute the database has no way of knowing other than polling the kernel. This prevents applications from responding quickly to changes in link events which at least in the FCoE case and probably any other protocols expecting a lossless link may result in IO errors. By adding a multicast group for DCB we have clean way to disseminate kernel DCB link attributes up to user space. Avoiding the need for user space to maintain a coherant database and disperse events that potentially do not reflect the current link state. Signed-off-by: John Fastabend <john.r.fastabend@intel.com> Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
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