This series includes a base set of drivers for the Unisys s-Par system. This set of drivers is enough to get a virtual guest up and running on s-Par hardware. The remaining drivers needed to have a fully functional system will be submitted after review of this initial set. s-Par is firmware that provides hardware partitioning capabilities for splitting large-scale Intel x86 servers into multiple isolated partitions. s-Par provides a set of para-virtualized device drivers to allow guest partitions on the same server to share devices that would normally be unsharable; specifically, PCI network interfaces and host bus adapters that do not support shared access via SR-IOV. The shared device is owned and managed by a small, single-purpose service partition, which communicates with each guest partition sharing that device through an area of shared memory called a channel. Additional drivers provide support interfaces for communicating with s-Par services, logging and diagnostics, and accessing the Linux console from the s-Par user interface. The driver stack consists of a set of support modules, a set of bus modules, and a set of device driver modules. The support modules handle a number of common functions across each of the other drivers. The bus modules provide organization for the device driver modules, which provide the shared device functionality. These drivers are for the Unisys virtual PCI hardware model where the hypervisor need not intervene (other than normal interrupt handling) in the interactions between the client drivers and the virtual adapter firmware in the adapter service partition. _______________________________________________ devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://driverdev.linuxdriverproject.org/mailman/listinfo/driverdev-devel
