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

[Andrew Lunn]

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