On 6/29/2017 12:11 PM, Allen Hubbe wrote:
This could get in the way of letting the driver support more than two ports later on. Is there already a plan to change this to support more than two ports?
Well, as I mentioned this patchset is only to support 2 ports. Future work will expand this and remove the restriction. The core concept of the emulated spads doesn't get in the way but will need some further consideration.
But multi-port support will need a lot more work in the ntb clients anyway. There's no sense having support in my driver until I can actually test things. And I'll probably be fine doing some of the client work once we get there.
This is also not the only hardware to lack scratchpads, but does have memory windows. Wouldn't it be better for a software substitute like this to be done in a way that it is not tied to a specific hardware driver?
Yeah, we discussed this previously. Some of this is kind of hardware dependent though. In this case we are using a small fixed size LUT window. If the other hardware doesn't have similar support, using up one of the BAR memory windows (which are a very limited resource) for this might not make sense.
The switchtec driver also uses this special memory window to negotiate link status.
Anyway, I'm happy to collaborate to making what common parts we can possible with the IDT driver but Serge seemed against the whole concept of emulation.
Logan
