Re: The IO problem on multiple PCI busses

[David S. Miller]

Benjamin Herrenschmidt writes:
 > I'm, of course open to any comments about this (in fact, I'd really like
 > some feedback). One thing is that we also need to find a way to pass
 > those infos to userland. Currently, we implement an arch-specific syscall
 > that allow to retreive the IO physical base of a given PCI bus. That may
 > be enough, but we may also want something that match more closely what we
 > do in the kernel.

Same problem on sparc64.  Using a special PCI syscall is fine, _if_ we
all end up using the same one.  However, I would prefer another
mechanism...

I think a cleaner scheme is to allow mmap() on
/proc/bus/pci/${BUS}/${DEVICE} nodes, that is much cleaner and solves
transparently any "different word size between userland and kernel"
issues (specifically 32-bit userlands executing on 64-bit kernels).

I played around with something akin to this, and some of the necessary
Xfree86-4.0.x hackery needed, some time ago.  But I never finished
this.

Later,
David S. Miller
[e-mail]