Saeed Mahameed says:
====================
E-Switch vport sharing & delegation
An mlx5 E-Switch FDB table can manage vports belonging to other sibling
physical functions, such as ECPF (ARM embedded cores) and Host PF (x86).
This enables a single source of truth for SDN software to manage network
pipelines from one host. While such functionality already exists in mlx5,
it is currently limited by static vport allocation,
meaning the number of vports shared between multi-host functions
must be known pre-boot.
This patchset enables delegated/external vports to be discovered
dynamically when switchdev mode is enabled, leveraging new firmware
capabilities for dynamic vport creation.
Adjacent functions that delegate their SR-IOV VFs to sibling PFs, can be
dynamically discovered on the sibling PF's switchdev mode enabling,
after sriov was enabled on the originating PF, allowing for more
flexible and scalable management in multi-host and ECPF-to-host
scenarios.
The patchset consists of the following changes:
- Refactoring of ACL root namespace handling: The storage of vport ACL root
namespaces is converted from a linear array to an xarray, allowing dynamic
creation of ACLs per individual vport.
- Improvements for vhca_id to vport mapping.
- Dynamic querying and creation of delegated functions/vports.
====================
Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20250829223722.900629-1-saeed@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Paolo Abeni <pabeni@redhat.com>