Re: [RFC] Inter-processor Mailboxes Drivers

On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 12:03:59PM +0200, Ohad Ben-Cohen wrote:

On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 12:01 PM, Jamie Iles [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 03:19:51PM -0600, Meador Inge wrote:

quoted

    1. Hardware specific bits somewhere under '.../arch/*'.  Drivers
       for the MPIC message registers on Power and OMAP4 mailboxes, for
       example.
    2. A higher level driver under '.../drivers/mailbox/*'.  That the
       pieces in (1) would register with.  This piece would expose the
       main kernel API.
    3. Userspace interfaces for accessing the mailboxes.  A
       '/dev/mailbox1', '/dev/mailbox2', etc... mapping, for example.

How about using virtio for all of this and having the mailbox as a
notification/message passing driver for the virtio backend?

This is exactly what we are doing now, and it looks promising. expect
patches soon.

I'll be happy to examine the feasibility of doing a port to mpc83xx as
soon as I see the code. :-) I have been using the message registers to
create a software "network card" over PCI (between a host system and an
mpc83xx in a PCI slot). I have wanted to use virtio for this task for a
long time.

I think a uniform interface for the mailbox registers would be a very
useful API.

Thanks,
Ira