[dpdk-dev] [PATCH 7/8] ethdev: break ethernet driver and pci_driver connection

[Stephen Hemminger]

On Tue, 10 Jan 2017 17:11:15 +0100
Jan Blunck <jblunck at infradead.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 7, 2017 at 7:17 PM, Stephen Hemminger
> <stephen at networkplumber.org> wrote:
> > There are multiple buses and device types now. Therefore it no longer
> > makes sense that PCI driver information is part of the Ethernet driver
> > structure.  
> 
> The Ethernet driver itself doesn't over alot of value from an
> abstraction point of view. Its questionable if there ever will be an
> Ethernet driver that is able to operate on different types of
> low-level devices. The virtual devices are anyway able to operate
> without an Ethernet driver structure. Most of that functionality
> should get moved either into the bus abstraction or the low-level
> device probe function.

I agree that that 'struct eth_driver' is not adding a lot now.
It should really be all folded back into 'struct rte_driver'.
The concept of init, uninit and private data are all generic and not
really specific to ethernet in anyway.

If we kill off eth_driver then PCI devices only have rte_pci_driver
and VMBUS can have rte_vmbus_driver.