On Monday 07 April 2014 09:31:20 Liviu Dudau wrote:
On Sat, Apr 05, 2014 at 01:19:53AM +0100, Bjorn Helgaas wrote:
Host bridges on x86 could have MMIO apertures that turn CPU memory accesses into PCI port accesses. We could implement any number of I/O port spaces this way, by making the kernel inb()/outb()/etc. interfaces smart enough to use the memory-mapped space instead of (or in addition to) the INB/OUTB/etc. instructions.
PowerPC actually has this already, as CONFIG_PPC_INDIRECT_PIO meaning that access to PIO registers is bus specific, and there is also CONFIG_PPC_INDIRECT_MMIO for the case where MMIO access is not native.
Right, sorry for my ignorance then: how does *currently* the device driver do the I/O transfer transparent of the implementation mechanism? Or they have intimate knowledge of wether the device is behind a host bridge and can do MMIO or is on an ISA or CF bus and then it needs INB/OUTB ? And if we make inb/outb smarter, does that mean that we need to change the drivers?
The idea of that would be to not change drivers.
My preference here would be to only have a generic function for those architectures that have the simple MMIO access all the time.
ia64 does this (see arch/ia64/include/asm/io.h for a little description) and I think maybe one or two other arches have something similar.
Introduce a pci_register_io_range() helper function that can be used by the architecture code to keep track of the I/O ranges described by the PCI bindings. If the PCI_IOBASE macro is not defined that signals lack of support for PCI and we return an error.
I don't quite see how you intend to use this, because this series doesn't include any non-stub implementation of pci_register_io_range().
Is this anything like the ia64 strategy I mentioned above? If so, it would be really nice to unify some of this stuff.
After discussions with Arnd and Catalin I know have a new series that moves some of the code from arm64 series into this one. I am putting it through testing right know as I am going to have to depend on another series that makes PCI_IOBASE defined only for architectures that do MMIO in order to choose the correct default implementation for these functions. My hope is that I will be able to send the series this week.
I think migrating other architectures to use the same code should be a separate effort from adding a generic implementation that can be used by arm64. It's probably a good idea to have patches to convert arm32 and/or microblaze.
Arnd