[PATCH] ixgbe: Removed FreeBSD forcing wait in ixgbe_dev_link_update_share()

[Lewis Donzis]

----- On Oct 22, 2024, at 10:34 AM, Stephen Hemminger stephen at networkplumber.org wrote:

> On Tue, 22 Oct 2024 09:42:05 -0500
> lew at perftech.com wrote:
> 
>> From: Lewis Donzis <lew at perftech.com>
>> 
>> Forcing wait true prevents checking link status without delay, because the
>> function will wait more than 10 seconds for link status to be true.
>> 
>> Signed-off-by: Lewis Donzis <lew at perftech.com>
> 
> A little concerned that original patch was trying to address a problem.
> 
> Fixes: 0012111a3d87 ("net/ixgbe: fix link status synchronization on BSD")

Yeah, I was concerned, too, but the fix causes a call to "give me link status immediately without waiting" to wait, and worse, it waits a really long time for the link to be "up".  So it pretty fundamentally breaks operation on FreeBSD.

I was worried it would wouldn't work properly with that change removed, but empirically, it appears to work correctly.  It seems like the presumption was that, because FreeBSD doesn't support interrupts, it wouldn't be able to get link status, but it does properly interrogate the hardware and provide the correct link status.

Perhaps Zhihong Peng could comment on why this was done?