Re: [PATCH 4/8] FMC: add documentation for the core

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On 02/21/2013 12:14:12 PM, Alessandro Rubini wrote:
This is selected sections of the current manual for fmc-bus, as
developed outside of the kernel before submission.

Signed-off-by: Alessandro Rubini <rubini@xxxxxxxxx>
Acked-by: Juan David Gonzalez Cobas <dcobas@xxxxxxx>
Acked-by: Emilio G. Cota <cota@xxxxxxxxx>
Acked-by: Samuel Iglesias Gonsalvez <siglesias@xxxxxxxxxx>

Acked-by: Rob Landley <rob@xxxxxxxxxxx>

On the basis it's all nicely in its own subdirectory not bothering anyone else.

That said:

+The data structure that describe a device is detailed in *note FMC
+Device::, the one that describes a driver is detailed in *note FMC
+Driver::.

What is this *note thingy:: syntax? It recurs a lot. Some sort of reference into the PDF you started out with a link to, maybe?

From your 00-INDEX additions:

+FMC-and-SDB.txt
+	- What are FMC and SDB, basic concepts for this framework

+What is FMC
+***********
+
+FMC, as said, stands for "FPGA Mezzanine Card". It is a standard
+developed by the VME consortium called VITA (VMEbus International Trade
+Association and ratified by ANSI, the American National Standard
+Institute.  The official documentation is called "ANSI-VITA 57.1".
+
+The FMC card is an almost square PCB, around 70x75 millimeters, that is
+called mezzanine in this document.  It usually lives plugged into
+another PCB for power supply and control; such bigger circuit board is +called carrier from now on, and a single carrier may host more than one
+mezzanine.

A basic concept of this framework is that you have a 70x75 PCB? Is this part of that ANSI-VITA standard?

+In the typical application the mezzanine is mostly analog while the
+carrier is mostly digital, and hosts an FPGA that must be configured to +match the specific mezzanine and the desired application. Thus, you may +need to load different FPGA images to drive different instances of the
+same mezzanine.

From the top level 00-INDEX:

+fmc/
+	- information about the FMC bus abstraction

And then...

+FMC, as such, is not a bus in the usual meaning of the term, because
+most carriers have only one connector, and carriers with several
+connectors have completely separate electrical connections to them.
+This package, however, implements a bus as a software abstraction.

USB is point to point connections with switches in between. It's still got B in the acronym. I'm not sure what you're saying here.

+
+What is SDB
+***********
+
+SDB (Self Describing Bus) is a set of data structures that we use for
+enumerating the internal structure of an FPGA image. We also use it as
+a filesystem inside the FMC EEPROM.

Are you trying to document infrastructure to implement a standard, or a bespoke driver for a specific piece of hardware? How much of this is generic? Are there other vendors who might someday want to use this code?

Anyway, no serious objection, but I note that reading to this point I didn't feel I had enough information to wrap my head around what it's for. It's documentation by people who already know this stuff, for people who already know this stuff. (There's a long tradition of that. Oh well.)

Rob
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