Re: [RFC PATCH 00/22] Enhance VHOST to enable SoC-to-SoC communication

[Jason Wang <jasowang@redhat.com>]

On 2020/9/9 上午12:37, Cornelia Huck wrote:
>> Then you need something that is functional equivalent to virtio PCI
>> which is actually the concept of vDPA (e.g vDPA provides alternatives if
>> the queue_sel is hard in the EP implementation).
> It seems I really need to read up on vDPA more... do you have a pointer
> for diving into this alternatives aspect?


See vpda_config_ops in include/linux/vdpa.h

Especially this part:

     int (*set_vq_address)(struct vdpa_device *vdev,
                   u16 idx, u64 desc_area, u64 driver_area,
                   u64 device_area);

This means for the devices (e.g endpoint device) that is hard to 
implement virtio-pci layout, it can use any other register layout or 
vendor specific way to configure the virtqueue.


>
>>> "Virtio Over NTB" should anyways be a new transport.
>>>> Does that make any sense?
>>> yeah, in the approach I used the initial features are hard-coded in
>>> vhost-rpmsg (inherent to the rpmsg) but when we have to use adapter
>>> layer (vhost only for accessing virtio ring and use virtio drivers on
>>> both front end and backend), based on the functionality (e.g, rpmsg),
>>> the vhost should be configured with features (to be presented to the
>>> virtio) and that's why additional layer or APIs will be required.
>> A question here, if we go with vhost bus approach, does it mean the
>> virtio device can only be implemented in EP's userspace?
> Can we maybe implement an alternative bus as well that would allow us
> to support different virtio device implementations (in addition to the
> vhost bus + userspace combination)?


That should be fine, but I'm not quite sure that implementing the device 
in kerne (kthread) is the good approach.

Thanks


>