Re: [RFC v2 1/2] PCI-Express Non-Transparent Bridge Support

On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 02:02:25PM -0400, chetan loke wrote:

On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 1:27 PM, Jon Mason [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

I don't see the benefit of having the driver in staging.  Any vendors
who would notice the ntb driver in staging would be sitting on these
mailing lists and hopefully have planety of comments on the design.
Stashing the driver in staging while waiting for these comments (which
may never come) doesn't seem the best course of action.

I thought that since others are talking about it then may be there is
some WIP code for foo-NTB. Seems like that's not the case. So no need
to stage.

Correct me if I'm wrong but wouldn't apps just open a socket and route
data via ntb_vir_eth_dev? So I don't see an ABI breakage issue and
hence nothing would prevent us from changing the kernel parts(for
accommodating some foo-NTB part) in future.

The virtual ethernet device (patch #2) would allow for a generic way
of passing data to the remote side.  The only issue would be changing
how it is encoded in the shared buffer.

It may not be a bad idea to prefix intel-specific(if any)
ntb_structs/variables/logic with the 'intc'(Intel ticker or pick your
string) keyword.

The Intel specific things are current pre-pended with "xeon" or "bwd".

Thanks,
Jon

Chetan Loke