Freescale's QorIQ line includes a new ethernet controller, based on their
Datapath Acceleration Architecture (DPAA). This uses a combination of a Frame
manager, Buffer manager, and Queue manager to improve performance across all
interfaces by being able to pass data directly between hardware acceleration
interfaces.
As part of this import, Freescale's Netcomm Software (ncsw) driver is imported.
This was an attempt by Freescale to create an OS-agnostic sub-driver for
managing the hardware, using shims to interface to the OS-specific APIs. This
work was abandoned, and Freescale's primary work is in the Linux driver (dual
BSD/GPL license). Hence, this was imported directly to sys/contrib, rather than
going through the vendor area. Going forward, FreeBSD-specific changes may be
made to the ncsw code, diverging from the upstream in potentially incompatible
ways. An alternative could be to import the Linux driver itself, using the
linuxKPI layer, as that would maintain parity with the vendor-maintained driver.
However, the Linux driver has not been evaluated for reliability yet, and may
have issues with the import, whereas the ncsw-based driver in this commit was
completed by Semihalf 4 years ago, and is very stable.
Other SoC modules based on DPAA, which could be added in the future:
* Security and Encryption engine (SEC4.x, SEC5.x)
* RAID engine
Additional work to be done:
* Implement polling mode
* Test vlan support
* Add support for the Pattern Matching Engine, which can do regular expression
matching on packets.
This driver has been tested on the P5020 QorIQ SoC. Others listed in the
dtsec(4) manual page are expected to work as the same DPAA engine is included in
all.
Obtained from: Semihalf
Relnotes: Yes
Sponsored by: Alex Perez/Inertial Computing
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