Re: Userspace I/O driver core

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Greg KH wrote:
But in order to get this core into the kernel tree, we need to have some
"real" drivers written that use it.  So, for anyone that wants to see
this go into the tree, now is the time to step forward and post your
patches for hardware that this kind of driver interface is needed.
We have a product being developed currently for which this interface is perfect.

The situation is that we have Linux collecting data from very many sources. The data is processed by throwing it at a memory address at which an FPGA lives. The FPGA processes the data and generates an interrupt upon completion at which time the processed data can be read back out. Linux doesn't know anything about the data except it's source and destination and, for security reasons, it has to stay that way. As such a formal driver makes little sense: data gets written to a memory address and a little while later it is read out again, that's it. The only fly in the ointment is the interrupt. Before I knew about these UIO patches I had written what effectively was a smaller version of UIO to handle this interrupt. With the UIO patches the whole process becomes trivial and I (along with my boss) become happy :-)

I shall submit a patch once I move my code over but it's almost not worth it, it will be truly trivial.

I can see a similar scenario being played out a lot in industrial control and other embedded systems. For example, if you just want to monitor a set of data but interrupt if something critical happens (or even just when the data is updated). All an in-kernel driver would do is handle an interrupt and perform copy_{to,from}_user()s but it would have to have a fair bit of fluff around it to signal to userland that the interrupt had occured. UIO is a clean, standard and powerful form of that fluff. Congrats to all who worked on her.

Regards,
  Ben.
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