linux-kernel - Re: [patch 00/11] GRU Driver

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Date:	Thu, 12 Jun 2008 11:03:36 -0700
From:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
To:	Jack Steiner <steiner@....com>
Cc:	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	tglx@...utronix.de, holt@....com, andrea@...ranet.com,
	"David S. Miller" <davem@...emloft.net>
Subject: Re: [patch 00/11] GRU Driver

On Thu, 12 Jun 2008 09:05:09 -0500 Jack Steiner <steiner@....com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 03:27:00PM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > 
> > * steiner@....com <steiner@....com> wrote:
> > 
> > > This series of patches adds a driver for the SGI UV GRU. The driver is 
> > > still in development but it currently compiles for both x86_64 & IA64. 
> > > All simple regression tests pass on IA64. Although features remain to 
> > > be added, I'd like to start the process of getting the driver into the 
> > > kernel. Additional kernel drivers will depend on services provide by 
> > > the GRU driver.
> > > 
> > > The GRU is a hardware resource located in the system chipset. The GRU 
> > > contains memory that is mmaped into the user address space. This 
> > > memory is used to communicate with the GRU to perform functions such 
> > > as load/store, scatter/gather, bcopy, AMOs, etc.  The GRU is directly 
> > > accessed by user instructions using user virtual addresses. GRU 
> > > instructions (ex., bcopy) use user virtual addresses for operands.
> > 
> > did i get it right that it's basically a fast, hardware based message 
> > passing interface that allows two tasks to communicate via DMA and 
> > interrupts, without holding up the CPU? 
> 
> Yes
> 
> 
> > If that is the case, wouldnt the 
> > proper support model be a network driver, instead of these special 
> > ioctls. (a network driver with no checksumming, with scatter-gather, 
> > zero-copy and TSO support, etc.)
> > 
> > or a filesystem. Anything but special-purpose ioctls ...
> 
> The ioctls are not used directly by users.
> 
> Users function the GRU by directly writing to the memory that is mmaped into
> GRU space, ie; load/store directly to GRU space. The ioctls are used
> infrequently by libgru.so to configure the driver during user initialization
> and to handle errors that may occur.
> 
> For example, here is the code that is required to issue a GRU
> instruction & wait for completion:
> 

But could/should it be implemented as (say) a net driver?
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