Re: [PATCH v2 6/7] misc: bcm-vk: add Broadcom VK driver

[Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Sat, Feb 22, 2020 at 09:02:44AM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 21, 2020 at 7:19 PM Scott Branden
> <scott.branden@broadcom.com> wrote:
> > On 2020-02-19 11:47 p.m., Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> 
> > > Have you worked with the V4L developers to tie this into the proper
> > > in-kernel apis for this type of functionality?
> > We looked at the V4L model doesn't have any support for anything we are
> > doing in this driver.
> > We also want a driver that doesn't care about video.  It could be
> > offloading crypto or other operations.
> > We talked with Olof about all of this previously and he said leave it as
> > a misc driver for now.
> > He was going to discuss at linux plumbers conference that we need some
> > sort of offload engine model that such devices could fit into.
> 
> I see. Have you looked at the "uacce" driver submission? It seems
> theirs is similar enough that there might be some way to share interfaces.
> 
> > > Using a tty driver seems like the totally incorrect way to do this, what
> > > am I missing?
> > tty driver is used to provide console access to the processors running
> > on vk.
> > Data is sent using the bcm_vk_msg interface by read/write operations
> > from user space.
> > VK then gets the messages and DMA's the data to/from host memory when
> > needed to process.
> 
> In turn here, it sounds like you'd want to look at what drivers/misc/mic/
> and the mellanox bluefield drivers are doing. As I understand, they have the
> same requirements for console, but have a nicer approach of providing
> abstract 'virtio' channels between the PCIe endpoint and the host, and
> then run regular virtio based drivers (console, tty, block, filesystem,
> network, ...) along with application specific ones to provide the custom
> high-level protocols. This is also similar to what the drivers/pci/endpoint
> (from the other end) as the drivers/ntb (pci host on both ends) frameworks
> and of course the rpmsg/remoteproc framework do.
> 
> In the long run, I would want much more consolidation between the
> low-level parts of all these frameworks, but moving your high-level
> protocols to the same virtio method would sound like a step in the
> direction towards a generialized framework and easier sharing of
> the abstractions.

I agree, please do not override the generic tty api with something so
hardware-specific like this as it really is not a serial device here.

thanks,

greg k-h