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

From: Jeffrey Hugo
Date: Wed Jun 07 2023 - 10:20:15 EST


On 6/7/2023 1:41 AM, Manivannan Sadhasivam wrote:
On Wed, Jun 07, 2023 at 09:12:00AM +0200, Loic Poulain wrote:
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?


Agree, mhi_*_net drivers can be used by non-modem devices too as long as they
support MHI protocol.

I know of at-least 1 non-modem product in development that would benefit from these drivers.