devlink: support directly reading from region memory

To read from a region, user space must currently request a new snapshot of
the region and then read from that snapshot. This can sometimes be overkill
if user space only reads a tiny portion. They first create the snapshot,
then request a read, then destroy the snapshot.

For regions which have a single underlying "contents", it makes sense to
allow supporting direct reading of the region data.

Extend the DEVLINK_CMD_REGION_READ to allow direct reading from a region if
requested via the new DEVLINK_ATTR_REGION_DIRECT. If this attribute is set,
then perform a direct read instead of using a snapshot. Direct read is
mutually exclusive with DEVLINK_ATTR_REGION_SNAPSHOT_ID, and care is taken
to ensure that we reject commands which provide incorrect attributes.

Regions must enable support for direct read by implementing the .read()
callback function. If a region does not support such direct reads, a
suitable extended error message is reported.

Signed-off-by: Jacob Keller <jacob.e.keller@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Jiri Pirko <jiri@nvidia.com>
Signed-off-by: Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>

1 files changed, 13 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/networking/devlink/devlink-region.rst b/Documentation/networking/devlink/devlink-region.rst
index f06dca9a1eb6..9232cd7da301 100644
--- a/Documentation/networking/devlink/devlink-region.rst
+++ b/Documentation/networking/devlink/devlink-region.rst
@@ -31,6 +31,15 @@ in its ``devlink_region_ops`` structure. If snapshot id is not set in
 the ``DEVLINK_CMD_REGION_NEW`` request kernel will allocate one and send
 the snapshot information to user space.
 
+Regions may optionally allow directly reading from their contents without a
+snapshot. Direct read requests are not atomic. In particular a read request
+of size 256 bytes or larger will be split into multiple chunks. If atomic
+access is required, use a snapshot. A driver wishing to enable this for a
+region should implement the ``.read`` callback in the ``devlink_region_ops``
+structure. User space can request a direct read by using the
+``DEVLINK_ATTR_REGION_DIRECT`` attribute instead of specifying a snapshot
+id.
+
 example usage
 -------------
 
@@ -65,6 +74,10 @@ example usage
     $ devlink region read pci/0000:00:05.0/fw-health snapshot 1 address 0 length 16
     0000000000000000 0014 95dc 0014 9514 0035 1670 0034 db30
 
+    # Read from the region without a snapshot
+    $ devlink region read pci/0000:00:05.0/fw-health address 16 length 16
+    0000000000000010 0000 0000 ffff ff04 0029 8c00 0028 8cc8
+
 As regions are likely very device or driver specific, no generic regions are
 defined. See the driver-specific documentation files for information on the
 specific regions a driver supports.