On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 10:47 PM Alex Elder [off-list ref] wrote:

On 5/31/19 2:19 PM, Arnd Bergmann wrote:

quoted

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 6:36 PM Alex Elder [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On 5/31/19 9:58 AM, Dan Williams wrote:

quoted

On Thu, 2019-05-30 at 22:53 -0500, Alex Elder wrote:

Does this mean that IPA can only be used to back rmnet, and rmnet
can only be used on top of IPA, or can or both of them be combined
with another driver to talk to instead?

No it does not mean that.

As I understand it, one reason for the rmnet layer was to abstract
the back end, which would allow using a modem, or using something
else (a LAN?), without exposing certain details of the hardware.
(Perhaps to support multiplexing, etc. without duplicating that
logic in two "back-end" drivers?)

To be perfectly honest, at first I thought having IPA use rmnet
was a cargo cult thing like Dan suggested, because I didn't see
the benefit.  I now see why one would use that pass-through layer
to handle the QMAP features.

But back to your question.  The other thing is that I see no
reason the IPA couldn't present a "normal" (non QMAP) interface
for a modem.  It's something I'd really like to be able to do,
but I can't do it without having the modem firmware change its
configuration for these endpoints.  My access to the people who
implement the modem firmware has been very limited (something
I hope to improve), and unless and until I can get corresponding
changes on the modem side to implement connections that don't
use QMAP, I can't implement such a thing.

Why would that require firmware changes? What I was thinking
here is to turn the bits of the rmnet driver that actually do anything
interesting on the headers into a library module (or a header file
with inline functions) that can be called directly by the ipa driver,
keeping the protocol unchanged.

quoted

Always passing data from one netdev to another both ways
sounds like it introduces both direct CPU overhead, and
problems with flow control when data gets buffered inbetween.

My impression is the rmnet driver is a pretty thin layer,
so the CPU overhead is probably not that great (though
deaggregating a message is expensive).  I agree with you
on the flow control.

The CPU overhead I mean is not from executing code in the
rmnet driver, but from passing packets through the network
stack between the two drivers, i.e. adding each frame to
a queue and taking it back out. I'm not sure how this ends
up working in reality but from a first look it seems like
we might bounce in an out of the softirq handler inbetween.

          Arnd