Re: [PATCH 0/3] Add MHI Endpoint network driver

From: Loic Poulain
Date: Wed Jun 07 2023 - 03:12:41 EST


On Wed, 7 Jun 2023 at 08:56, Manivannan Sadhasivam
<manivannan.sadhasivam@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jun 06, 2023 at 02:59:00PM +0200, Andrew Lunn wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 06, 2023 at 06:01:16PM +0530, Manivannan Sadhasivam wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > This series adds a network driver for the Modem Host Interface (MHI) endpoint
> > > devices that provides network interfaces to the PCIe based Qualcomm endpoint
> > > devices supporting MHI bus (like Modems). This driver allows the MHI endpoint
> > > devices to establish IP communication with the host machines (x86, ARM64) over
> > > MHI bus.
> > >
> > > On the host side, the existing mhi_net driver provides the network connectivity
> > > to the host.
> > >
> > > - Mani
> > >
> > > Manivannan Sadhasivam (3):
> > > net: Add MHI Endpoint network driver
> > > MAINTAINERS: Add entry for MHI networking drivers under MHI bus
> > > net: mhi: Increase the default MTU from 16K to 32K
> > >
> > > MAINTAINERS | 1 +
> > > drivers/net/Kconfig | 9 ++
> > > drivers/net/Makefile | 1 +
> > > drivers/net/mhi_ep_net.c | 331 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> > > drivers/net/mhi_net.c | 2 +-
> >
> > Should we add a drivers/net/modem directory? Maybe modem is too
> > generic, we want something which represents GSM, LTE, UMTS, 3G, 4G,
> > 5G, ... XG etc.
> >
>
> The generic modem hierarchy sounds good to me because most of the times a
> single driver handles multiple technologies. The existing drivers supporting
> modems are already under different hierarchy like usb, wwan etc... So unifying
> them makes sense. But someone from networking community should take a call.


Yes, so there is already a drivers/net/wwan directory for this, in
which there are drivers for control and data path, that together
represent a given 'wwan' (modem) entity. So the generic mhi_net could
be moved there, but the point is AFAIU, that MHI, despite his name, is
not (more) used only for modem, but as a generic memory sharing based
transport protocol, such as virtio. It would then not be necessarily
true that a peripheral exposing MHI net channel is actually a modem?

Regards,
Loic