[Cbe-oss-dev] [RFC 0/9] Axon drivers

[jdubois at mc.com]

These patches are not meant for integration.

They are provided here as a proposal and a base for discussion for an Axon
driver framework to allow multiple drivers/services to share the resources.

In addition the provided code has some limitation that prevent it to be
integrated as is.
1) the drivers are provided without comment as requested by the Axon IP owner.
2) the drivers are tested on 2.6.16 (for the Cell part) as this is the only
kernel version that can support the actual CAB device tree. I don't have
yet another Axon based platform with a device tree able to support 2.6.19 or
later. this mean the actual code is missing some features to support some
new kernel feature like virtual IRQs or whatever bus abstraction there might
now be for the internal Axon bus.

Note that the proposed driver has been tested quite a bit on the CAB board
and allow the Cell and the PCI-E host to access all the Axon resources on an
equal stand. This mean a driver writen for the Cell on top of this
framework should just work on the host. A typical example is the Ethernet
over PCI driver where the same driver code (not binary obviously) run on
the host and on the Cell.

So this driver goes on top of the recent patches I sent for the 2.6.16 kernel
for the CAB that were on top of Arnd patches for FCAB.
(http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/arnd/patches/2.6.16-arnd2-cab1)
In particular one important feature is the support of the MBX direct
interrupt as the indirect interrupt is unfortunately not reliable in the
actual Axon.


--