From: Santosh Shilimkar <redacted>
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2014 11:12:39 -0400

Update version after incorporating David Miller's comment from earlier
posting [1]. I would like to get these merged for upcoming 3.18 merge
window if there are no concerns on this version.

The network coprocessor (NetCP) is a hardware accelerator that processes
Ethernet packets. NetCP has a gigabit Ethernet (GbE) subsystem with a ethernet
switch sub-module to send and receive packets. NetCP also includes a packet
accelerator (PA) module to perform packet classification operations such as
header matching, and packet modification operations such as checksum
generation. NetCP can also optionally include a Security Accelerator(SA)
capable of performing IPSec operations on ingress/egress packets.
    
Keystone SoC's also have a 10 Gigabit Ethernet Subsystem (XGbE) which
includes a 3-port Ethernet switch sub-module capable of 10Gb/s and
1Gb/s rates per Ethernet port.
    
NetCP driver has a plug-in module architecture where each of the NetCP
sub-modules exist as a loadable kernel module which plug in to the netcp
core. These sub-modules are represented as "netcp-devices" in the dts
bindings. It is mandatory to have the ethernet switch sub-module for
the ethernet interface to be operational. Any other sub-module like the
PA is optional.

Both GBE and XGBE network processors supported using common driver. It
is also designed to handle future variants of NetCP.

I don't want to see an offload driver that doesn't plug into the existing
generic frameworks for configuration et al.

If no existing facility exists to support what you need, you must work
with the upstream maintainers to design and create one.

It is absolutely no reasonable for every "switch on a chip" driver to
export it's own configuration knob, we need a standard interface all
such drivers will plug into and provide.