Hi Andrew,

On 11/09/25 9:34 pm, Andrew Davis wrote:

On 9/11/25 6:36 AM, MD Danish Anwar wrote:

quoted

This patch series introduces the RPMSG Ethernet driver, which provides a
virtual Ethernet interface for communication between a host processor and
a remote processor using the RPMSG framework. The driver enables
Ethernet-like packet transmission and reception over shared memory,
facilitating inter-core communication in systems with heterogeneous
processors.

This is neat and all but I have to ask: why? What does this provide
that couldn't be done with normal RPMSG messages? Or from a userspace
TAP/TUN driver on top of RPMSG?

This is different from RPMSG because here I am not using RPMSG to do the
actual TX / RX. RPMSG is only used to share information (tx / rx
offsets, buffer size, etc) between driver and firmware. The TX / RX
happens in the shared memory. This implementation uses a shared memory
circular buffer with head/tail pointers for efficient data passing
without copies between cores.

This also feels like some odd layering, as RPMSG sits on virtio, and
we have virtio-net, couldn't we have a firmware just expose that (or
would the firmware be vhost-net..)?

PMSG sits on virtio, and we do have virtio-net but I am not trying to do
ethernet communication over RPMSG. RPMSG is only used to exchange
information between cores regarding the shared memory where the actual
ethernet communication happens.

Andrew

-- 
Thanks and Regards,
Danish