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From:   Arnd Bergmann <arnd@kernel.org>
Date:   Mon, 16 Nov 2020 16:37:05 +0100
Message-ID: <CAK8P3a0nTdtADPa_5jduDm5MpBiwBNgs7cYokK5qBZ=RkL1Ktg@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v7 15/18] NTB: Add support for EPF PCI-Express
 Non-Transparent Bridge
To:     Kishon Vijay Abraham I <kishon@ti.com>
Cc:     Sherry Sun <sherry.sun@nxp.com>,
        "bhelgaas@google.com" <bhelgaas@google.com>,
        Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>,
        "lorenzo.pieralisi@arm.com" <lorenzo.pieralisi@arm.com>,
        "arnd@arndb.de" <arnd@arndb.de>,
        "jdmason@kudzu.us" <jdmason@kudzu.us>,
        "dave.jiang@intel.com" <dave.jiang@intel.com>,
        "allenbh@gmail.com" <allenbh@gmail.com>,
        "tjoseph@cadence.com" <tjoseph@cadence.com>,
        Rob Herring <robh@kernel.org>,
        "gregkh@linuxfoundation.org" <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
        "linux-pci@vger.kernel.org" <linux-pci@vger.kernel.org>,
        "linux-doc@vger.kernel.org" <linux-doc@vger.kernel.org>,
        "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        "linux-ntb@googlegroups.com" <linux-ntb@googlegroups.com>
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On Mon, Nov 16, 2020 at 6:19 AM Kishon Vijay Abraham I <kishon@ti.com> wrote:
> On 12/11/20 6:54 pm, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> >
> > This looks very  promising indeed, I need to read up on the whole
> > discussion there. I also see your slides at [1]  that help do explain some
> > of it. I have one fundamental question that I can't figure out from
> > the description, maybe you can help me here:
> >
> > How is the configuration managed, taking the EP case as an
> > example? Your UseCase1 example sounds like the system that owns
> > the EP hardware is the one that turns the EP into a vhost device,
> > and creates a vhost-rpmsg device on top, while the RC side would
> > probe the pci-vhost and then detect a virtio-rpmsg device to talk to.
>
> That's correct. Slide no 9 in [1] should give the layering details.
>
> > Can it also do the opposite, so you end up with e.g. a virtio-net
> > device on the EP side and vhost-net on the RC?
>
> Unfortunately no. Again referring slide 9 in [1], we only have
> vhost-pci-epf on the EP side which only creates a "vhost_dev" to deal
> with vhost side of things. For doing the opposite, we'd need to create
> virtio-pci-epf for EP side that interacts with core virtio (and also the
> corresponding vhost back end on PCI host).

Ok, I see. So I think this is the opposite of drivers/misc/mic and
the bluefield driver were using, so we would probably end up
needing both.

Then again, I guess the NTB driver would give us the functionality
for free, if it shows a symmetric link?

      Arnd