Re: [dpdk-dev] [PATCH v2 13/16] Removed PCI ID table from igb_uio

[Thomas Monjalon <thomas.monjalon@6wind.com>]

2014-05-23 00:10, Antti Kantee:
> On 22/05/14 13:13, Thomas Monjalon wrote:
> > 2014-05-19 16:51, Anatoly Burakov:
> >> Note that since igb_uio no longer has a PCI ID list, it can now be
> >> bound to any device, not just those explicitly supported by DPDK. In
> >> other words, it now behaves similar to PCI stub, VFIO and other generic
> >> PCI drivers.
> > 
> > I wonder if we could replace igb_uio by uio_pci_generic?
> 
> I've been running plenty of the NetBSD kernel PCI drivers in Linux
> userspace on top of uio_pci_generic, including NICs supported by DPDK.
> The only real annoyance is that mainline uio_pci_generic doesn't support
> MSI.  A pseudo-annoyance is that uio_pci_generic turns interrupts off
> from the PCI config space each time after you read an interrupt, so they
> have to be reenabled after each one (and NetBSD kernel drivers tend to
> like using interrupts for everything).
> 
> The annoyance of vfio is iommus.  Yes, I want to make the tradeoff of
> possibly scribbling memory vs. not being able to do anything on the
> wrong system.
> 
> I'd like to see a generic Linux kernel PCI driver blob without
> annoyances, though not yet annoyed enough to do anything myself ;)

So maybe it's possible to improve uio_pci_generic in order to replace igb_uio.
If someone wants to work on it, it's possible to stage uio_pci_generic in 
dpdk.org in order to make it ready for kernel.org.

-- 
Thomas