[PATCH 0 of 20] [RFC] ipath driver - another round for review

I posted these patches for review this morning, but due to a bug in my
posting script, only Roland actually received them. In fact, this version
of these patches contains a few changes in response to his comments.

Thanks, Roland!

The original text from this morning follows.

Here is another set of ipath driver patches for review. The list of
changes compared to the last patch set I posted is huge, so I won't go
into it here. Suffice it to say that we've taken every reviewer
comment into account, and done a *lot* of work to clean things up.

I'll point out a few things that I think are worth attention.

- We've introduced support for our PCI Express chips, so the driver
is no longer HyperTransport-specific. It's still a 64-bit driver,
because 32-bit platforms don't implement readq or writeq. (It
does compile cleanly on i386, but of course fails to link.)

- We've added an ethernet emulation driver so that if you're not
using Infiniband support, you still have a high-performance net
device (lower latency and higher bandwidth than IPoIB) for IP
traffic.

- There are no longer any fixed tables of device structures.
Instead we allocate device structures dynamically using
pci_alloc_consistent or dma_alloc_coherent, and use the
<linux/idr.h> stuff to number them.

- There are no more ioctls anywhere.

- Huge source files have been split up into digestible, logical
chunks.

- A few more sparse annotations.

- Buckets of other cleanups. Code reformatting, comment
reformatting, trimming code to <= 76 cols, you name it.

There are still a few things left to do that I know of.

- Since the core driver isn't really an IB driver at all, perhaps it
belongs in drivers/char instead of drivers/infiniband/hw?

- Our hardware only supports MSI interrupts. I don't know how to
program it to interrupt us if CONFIG_PCI_MSI is not set. Right
now, we have a timer-based hack in place to emulate interrupts.

- Not all of the code is 80- or 76-col clean yet. I'm working on
this.

- I guess we need to face the music and use sysfs binary attributes
in the two cases where we're not at the moment :-)

- There's clearly something wrong with the way we're pinning some
pages into memory, but I don't actually know what it is. I'm
pretty sure our use of get_user_pages is correct, so I suspect it
must be the code that's doing SetPageReserved (see ipath_driver.c
and ipath_file_ops.c).

I've spent some time trying to figure out what the problem is, but
am stumped. If someone knows what we should be doing instead, I'd
be delighted to hear from them.

If you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know.

<b

Relevant Pages

  • Re: 2.6.11-rc2-mm1: SuperIO scx200 breakage
    ... anyone to review it. ... Also note that your patches are about superio, ... The list is dedicated to hardware monitoring. ... > Your pc87360 driver is all in one big piese of code, ...
    (Linux-Kernel)
  • Re: [lm-sensors] Hardware monitoring subsystem maintainer position is open
    ... their driver currently is. ... > 2) quick review could be done critical fixes only, ... > 3) review that goes deeper - check for interface conformity and all the ... Neither it does solve the maintainer problem, ...
    (Linux-Kernel)
  • Re: Distributed storage release.
    ... I am pleased to announce new distributed storage (DST) project release. ... although it would take a lot of time and the review ... This is the virtual block driver for virtio. ...
    (Linux-Kernel)
  • Re: [lm-sensors] Hardware monitoring subsystem maintainer position is open
    ... quick review could be done critical fixes only, driver goes to -mm ... review that goes deeper - check for interface conformity and all the stuff which could break - fixes for non-critical stuff ... Person posts driver ...
    (Linux-Kernel)
  • Re: [PATCH] i2c: new driver for ds1337 RTC
    ... > Driver is tested and works with DS1339, ... Please slice this into separarte patches. ... I can't review patches which do ... please avoid noise in your patch. ...
    (Linux-Kernel)