Hi Meador, From: ext Meador Inge <meador_i...@mentor.com> Subject: [RFC] Inter-processor Mailboxes Drivers Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2011 15:19:51 -0600
> Hi All, > > I am currently working on building AMP systems using OpenMCAPI > (https://bitbucket.org/hollisb/openmcapi/wiki/Home) as the > inter-processor communication mechanism. With OpenMCAPI we, of > course, > need a way to send messages to various cores. On some Freescale PPC > platforms (e.g. P1022DS, MPC8572DS), we have been using message > registers to do this work. Recently, I was looking at the OMAP4 > mailboxes to gear up for moving into ARM based platforms. > > With that, I noticed 'arch/arm/plat-omap/mailbox.c'. This is very > specific to the OMAP4 boards. I am looking at designing a new set of > drivers to expose a mailbox service to userspace that will be used > for inter-processor communication. This would entail the traditional > generic/specific driver split: > > 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. > > Now I have the following questions: > > 1. Do others see value in this? Yes. I discussed this with TI(Hari) long time ago, but it didn't proceed with some reason, not techinical one. > 2. Does something like this already exist? > 3. Is someone else already working on this? > > Any feedback will be greatly appreciated. Now the basic concpet can be devided into 3 parts, (1)HW dependent, (2) generic driver, (3) character device interface. I guess that it might be good to have one _pseudo_ H/W instance, then easier for verification without real H/W and firmwares, across multiplatforms. _______________________________________________ Linuxppc-dev mailing list Linuxppc-dev@lists.ozlabs.org https://lists.ozlabs.org/listinfo/linuxppc-dev
