Re: [PATCH] firmware: arm_scmi: Make scmi core independent of transport type

Sudeep Holla
2020-01-06T11:00:18Z

On Tue, Dec 31, 2019 at 02:09:27PM -0600, Jassi Brar wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 29, 2019 at 3:32 AM Viresh Kumar <viresh.kumar@linaro.org> wrote:
> >
> > The SCMI specification is fairly independent of the transport protocol,
> > which can be a simple mailbox (already implemented) or anything else.
> > The current Linux implementation however is very much dependent of the
> > mailbox transport layer.
> >
> > This patch makes the SCMI core code (driver.c) independent of the
> > mailbox transport layer and moves all mailbox related code to a new
> > file: mailbox.c.
> >
> > We can now implement more transport protocols to transport SCMI
> > messages.
> >
> > The transport protocols just need to provide struct scmi_transport_ops,
> > with its version of the callbacks to enable exchange of SCMI messages.
> >
> We can either add new transport layer between SCMI and Mailbox layers,
> or we can write new transport as a mailbox driver (which I always
> thought could be a usecase). Right now I am of no strong opinion
> either way. Depends, what other transport do you have in mind?
>

To be more clear, this patch abstracts the SCMI transport so that mailbox
can be one of the transport. The plan is to add SMC/HVC, SMC/HVC over SPCI,
vitio based transport as alternative to mailbox. These are neither added
as mailbox driver nor transport layer between SCMI and Mailbox. E.g.:
we either use Peng's SMC based mailbox driver as is or add a new transport
independent of mailbox framework here as SCMI transport.

--
Regards,
Sudeep