[RFC] Inter-processor Mailboxes Drivers

[Meador Inge <meador_inge@mentor.com>]

Hi All,

I am currently working on building AMP systems using OpenMCAPI
(https://bitbucket.org/hollisb/openmcapi/wiki/Home) as the
inter-processor communication mechanism.  With OpenMCAPI we, of course,
need a way to send messages to various cores.  On some Freescale PPC
platforms (e.g. P1022DS, MPC8572DS), we have been using message
registers to do this work.  Recently, I was looking at the OMAP4
mailboxes to gear up for moving into ARM based platforms.

With that, I noticed 'arch/arm/plat-omap/mailbox.c'.  This is very
specific to the OMAP4 boards.  I am looking at designing a new set of
drivers to expose a mailbox service to userspace that will be used
for inter-processor communication.  This would entail the traditional
generic/specific driver split:

     1. Hardware specific bits somewhere under '.../arch/*'.  Drivers
        for the MPIC message registers on Power and OMAP4 mailboxes, for
        example.
     2. A higher level driver under '.../drivers/mailbox/*'.  That the
        pieces in (1) would register with.  This piece would expose the
        main kernel API.
     3. Userspace interfaces for accessing the mailboxes.  A
        '/dev/mailbox1', '/dev/mailbox2', etc... mapping, for example.

Now I have the following questions:

     1. Do others see value in this?
     2. Does something like this already exist?
     3. Is someone else already working on this?

Any feedback will be greatly appreciated.

-- 
Meador Inge     | meador_inge AT mentor.com
Mentor Embedded | http://www.mentor.com/embedded-software