[RFC] Inter-processor Mailboxes Drivers

[Ira W. Snyder]

On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 12:03:59PM +0200, Ohad Ben-Cohen wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 12:01 PM, Jamie Iles <jamie at jamieiles.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 03:19:51PM -0600, Meador Inge wrote:
> >>     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.
> >
> > How about using virtio for all of this and having the mailbox as a
> > notification/message passing driver for the virtio backend?
> 
> This is exactly what we are doing now, and it looks promising. expect
> patches soon.

I'll be happy to examine the feasibility of doing a port to mpc83xx as
soon as I see the code. :-) I have been using the message registers to
create a software "network card" over PCI (between a host system and an
mpc83xx in a PCI slot). I have wanted to use virtio for this task for a
long time.

I think a uniform interface for the mailbox registers would be a very
useful API.

Thanks,
Ira