Re: The Linux Staging tree, what it is and is not.

From: Alan Cox
Date: Fri Mar 20 2009 - 11:36:39 EST


> My understanding of an object dictionary is that it is only a structured
> view to a set of configuration variables, process variables and
> diagnostic information. It could also be an XML file or a simple C
> struct. In our implementation the object dictionary is not necessarily
> the backing store of the data. The process variables for example are

It's also possible I think to look at the object dictionary as no
different from port numbers. The object identifiers tell you who owns the
data and thus who needs to be told. I admit to being a bit rusty on this.
My last near encounters with fieldbus type systems were some years ago
when I²IT was involved in EMUG and OLCHFA and I managed to keep out of
the blast radius of those ;)

> information of what to copy to where comes from the object dictionary.
> But it is possible to extract this information from the objdict and pass
> it via generic structures (e.g. something like IO vectors) to the PDO
> module in kernel. The information flow of the configuration data is
> one-way only, from userspace to kernel. This is what I plan to implement
> in openPOWERLINK, because the copy information can also be passed to a
> special hardware like a DMA controller.

Ok so your hardware in fact really is oriented around an mmap type
interface ?

Alan
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