On Fri, Feb 14, 2020 at 12:05:32PM +0800, Jason Wang wrote:
Sure, but those are not connecting HW into the kernel..The standard driver model is a 'bus' driver provides the HW accessThis is not true, kernel had already had plenty virtual bus where virtual
(think PCI level things), and a 'hw driver' attaches to the bus
device,
devices and drivers could be attached, besides mdev and virtio, you can see
vop, rpmsg, visorbus etc.
rdma also has about 20 different types of things it supports on top ofand instantiates a 'subsystem device' (think netdev, rdma,
etc) using some per-subsystem XXX_register().
Well, if you go through virtio spec, we support ~20 types of different
devices. Classes like netdev and rdma are correct since they have a clear
set of semantics their own. But grouping network and scsi into a single
class looks wrong, that's the work of a virtual bus.
the generic ib_device.
The central point in RDMA is the 'struct ib_device' which is a device
class. You can discover all RDMA devices by looking in /sys/class/infiniband/
It has an internal bus like thing (which probably should have been an
actual bus, but this was done 15 years ago) which allows other
subsystems to have drivers to match and bind their own drivers to the
struct ib_device.
So you'd have a chain like:
struct pci_device -> struct ib_device -> [ib client bus thing] -> struct net_device
And the various char devs are created by clients connecting to the
ib_device and creating char devs on their own classes.
Since ib_devices are multi-queue we can have all 20 devices running
concurrently and there are various schemes to manage when the various
things are created.
See the other mail, it seems struct virtio_device serves this purposeThe 'hw driver' pulls inThe point is we want vDPA devices to be used by different subsystems, not
functions from the 'subsystem' using a combination of callbacks and
library-style calls so there is no code duplication.
only vhost, but also netdev, blk, crypto (every subsystem that can use
virtio devices). That's why we introduce vDPA bus and introduce different
drivers on top.
already, confused why a struct vdpa_device and another bus is being
introduced
There're several examples that a bus is needed on top.How is that another bus? The platform bus is the HW bus, the TmFIFO is
A good example is Mellanox TmFIFO driver which is a platform device driver
but register itself as a virtio device in order to be used by virito-console
driver on the virtio bus.
the HW driver, and virtio_device is the subsystem.
This seems reasonable/normal so far..
But it's a pity that the device can not be used by userspace driver due toAh! Maybe this is the source of all this strangeness - the userspace
the limitation of virito bus which is designed for kernel driver. That's why
vDPA bus is introduced which abstract the common requirements of both kernel
and userspace drivers which allow the a single HW driver to be used by
kernel drivers (and the subsystems on top) and userspace drivers.
driver is something parallel to the struct virtio_device instead of
being a consumer of it??
That certianly would mess up the driver model
quite a lot.
Then you want to add another bus to switch between vhost and struct
virtio_device? But only for vdpa?
But as you point out something like TmFIFO is left hanging. Seems like
the wrong abstraction point..
Jason