Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 30 Nov 2012 09:36:44 -0800 | From | Greg KH <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH 2/2] New driver: Xillybus generic interface for FPGA (programmable logic) |
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On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 05:28:47PM +0000, Arnd Bergmann wrote: > On Wednesday 28 November 2012, Eli Billauer wrote: > > > > Xillybus is a general-purpose framework for communication between programmable > > logic (FPGA) and a host. It provides a simple connection between hardware FIFOs > > in the FPGA and their respective device files on the host. The user space > > programming model is like piping data from or to the FPGA. > > > > The underlying transport between the host and FPGA is either PCIe or AXI > > (AMBA bus by ARM). > > > > The Xillybus logic (IP core) is configurable in the number of pipes it presents > > and their nature. The driver autodetects these pipes, making it essentially > > forward-compatible to future configurations. The benefit of having this driver > > enabled in the kernel is that hardware vendors may release a new card, knowing > > that it will work out of the box on any future Linux machine, with the specific > > configuration defined for the FPGA part. > > > > This driver has been available for download for over a year, and has been > > actively used on a wide variety of kernels versions and configurations. > > I have a much higher-level comment on this driver: There seem to be a number > of parties that are interested in having reprogrammable logic available in > Linux and that will want to merge their drivers. I'm aware of these other > people that must have some interest (and one person I can't mention here > because of NDA): > > Philip Balister <philip@balister.org> (OpenSDR) > Dinh Nguyen <dinguyen@altera.com> (ARM SOCFPGA maintainer) > Pavel Machek <pavel@denx.de> (SOCFPGA contributor) > John Linn <john.linn@xilinx.com> (Zynq maintainer) > Michal Simek <michal.simek@xilinx.com> (Zynq maintainer) > Ira W. Snyder <iws@ovro.caltech.edu> (Carma driver author)
Yes, I know of at least one more device other than the ones listed above that wants this type of functionality as well, so defining it in a standard user/kernel api manner would be very good to do.
thanks,
greg k-h
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