[RFC] Inter-processor Mailboxes Drivers

[Sundar]

Hi,

On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 2:49 AM, Meador Inge <meador_inge at mentor.com> wrote:
>
>    1. Hardware specific bits somewhere under '.../arch/*'.  Drivers
>       for the MPIC message registers on Power and OMAP4 mailboxes, for
>       example.

Yes; this can help.

>    2. A higher level driver under '.../drivers/mailbox/*'.  That the
>       pieces in (1) would register with.  This piece would expose the
>       main kernel API.

A lot of mailboxes are too platform specific with regards to the communication
with the main CPU and probably it depends on the mailbox too; you can
find polling and
interrupt supported mailbox support at times on the same platform.
APIs should probably be
generic enough to be able to operate in any context.

> Now I have the following questions:
>
>    1. Do others see value in this?

At least I would like this; I wanted to generalize such mailbox IPCs
right from the
day when I was working on one, but coudnt really work on that.

>    2. Does something like this already exist?

Not generic as you say; but apart from the OMAP platforms,
you could refer to arch/arm/mach-ux500/prcmu for a mailbox based
IPC on the U8500 platform.

>    3. Is someone else already working on this?

Not sure of that too :), but I am CCing Linus W, the maintainer
of U8500 if he thinks it is a good idea to come up with a mailbox IPC
framework

Cheers!
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