Addressed Vadim's and Corey's comments. 1) I added support to instantiate several ipmb devices in the case where there are multiple BMCs requesting data via IPMB to one Satellite MC. Each instantiated device is named after the IPMBus/I2C bus number it is associated with. I have documented all this in IPMB.txt. 2) I think it might be confusing to use rol16 along with GENMASK since it isn't as straight forward to read as a simple (u8) typecast. I haven't really seen examples in the linux kernel where this combo is being used as a substistute for typecasting; while I have found multiple drivers where typecasting to (u8) is being used: bt-bmc.c, kcs_bmc_aspeed.c, kcs_bmc_npcm7xx.c. If you strongly feel it is worth it, I will change it. 3) I could eventually upstream the BMC driver I have been using to test this ipmb-dev-int. The reason I needed it is because the ipmb-dev-int driver is not responsible for sending requests via I2C. It is only responsible for receiving those requests and passing them to a user space program. Once a response is received from the user space program, the driver will forward that response back to the source requester. The driver that I have on my bmc, is called ipmb-host. It works hand in hand with ipmi_msghandler and ipmi_devintf to create the /dev/ipmi0 device file to enable the use of ipmitool program on the BMC. Once an ipmitool command is issued on the BMC, the request message is sent to the Satellite MC. Once the BMC received a response back from the Satellite MC, it will pass it to the ipmitool program which will display the output to the user. ipmb-dev-int does not need the msghandler not the devintf to be loaded. Asmaa Mnebhi (1): Add support for IPMB driver Documentation/IPMB.txt | 64 +++++++ drivers/char/ipmi/Kconfig | 8 + drivers/char/ipmi/Makefile | 1 + drivers/char/ipmi/ipmb_dev_int.c | 384 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 4 files changed, 457 insertions(+) create mode 100644 Documentation/IPMB.txt create mode 100644 drivers/char/ipmi/ipmb_dev_int.c -- 2.1.2
