Not all ports of a switch need to be used, particularly in embedded
systems. Add a port flavour for ports which physically exist in the
switch, but are not connected to the front panel etc, and so are
unused. By having unused ports present in devlink, it gives a more
accurate representation of the hardware. It also allows regions to be
associated to such ports, so allowing, for example, to determine
unused ports are correctly powered off, or to compare probable reset
defaults of unused ports to used ports experiences issues.
Actually registering unused ports and setting the flavour to unused is
optional. The DSA core will register all such switch ports, but such
ports are expected to be limited in number. Bigger ASICs may decide
not to list unused ports.
v2:
Expand the description about why it is useful
Reviewed-by: Vladimir Oltean <olteanv@gmail.com>
Tested-by: Vladimir Oltean <olteanv@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Lunn <andrew@lunn.ch>
Reviewed-by: Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
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