Re: [PATCH net-next v2 0/3] Introducing Intercore Virtual Ethernet (ICVE) driver

[Yojana Mallik <y-mallik@ti.com>]

On 6/2/24 21:15, Andrew Lunn wrote:
> On Fri, May 31, 2024 at 12:10:03PM +0530, Yojana Mallik wrote:
>> virtio-net provides a solution for virtual ethernet interface in a
>> virtualized environment.
>>
>> There might be a use-case for traffic tunneling between heterogeneous
>> processors in a non virtualized environment such as TI's AM64x that has
>> Cortex A53 and Cortex R5 where Linux runs on A53 and a flavour of RTOS
>> on R5(FreeRTOS) and the ethernet controller is managed by R5 and needs
>> to pass some low priority data to A53.
>>
>> One solution for such an use case where the ethernet controller does
>> not support DMA for Tx/Rx channel, could be a RPMsg based shared memory
>> ethernet driver.
> 
> virtio-net is very generic and vendor agnostic.
> 
> Looking at icve, what is TI specific? Why not define a generic
> solution which could be used for any heterogeneous system? We are
> seeming more and more such systems, and there is no point everybody
> re-inventing the wheel. So what i would like to see is something
> similar to driver/tty/rpmsg_tty.c, a driver/net/ethernet/rpmsg_eth.c,
> with good documentation of the protocol used, so that others can
> implement it. And since you say you have FreeRTOS on the other end,
> you could also contribute that side to FreeRTOS as well. A complete
> open source solution everybody can use.
> 
> 	Andrew

+static struct rpmsg_device_id icve_rpmsg_id_table[] = {
+	{ .name = "ti.icve" },
+	{},
+};
+MODULE_DEVICE_TABLE(rpmsg, icve_rpmsg_id_table);
+
+static struct rpmsg_driver icve_rpmsg_client = {
+	.drv.name = KBUILD_MODNAME,
+	.id_table = icve_rpmsg_id_table,
+	.probe = icve_rpmsg_probe,
+	.callback = icve_rpmsg_cb,
+	.remove = icve_rpmsg_remove,
+};
+module_rpmsg_driver(icve_rpmsg_client);
+
When the Linux kernel detects an rpmsg device (the communication channel), it
looks for a matching driver that can handle this device with the help of name
string in the icve_rpmsg_id_table in driver structure. I will change the name
string to make the driver generic. Apart from the name string other entities
don't look TI specific.
Thank you for the suggestion to make inter-core virtual ethernet driver generic
like drivers/tty/rpmsg_tty.c for a complete open source solution. I will be
working on it.

Regard,
Yojana Mallik