Hi Alex,
On 23.10.18 14:50, Joel Nider wrote:
I have been looking at several drivers in Genode, and they all seem to
have static data - specifically a Heap object and Root object. I am wondering with this kind of setup, is it possible to manage more than
one
device with a single driver?
of course. As described in the Genode book [0] in chapter 3.2.3, the root object provides the implementation just of the interface. Whenever a client connects to a service (like a driver for nic, ahci, nvme, usb etc.) a session is established via this interface. The driver may associate (typically does so depending on your specified policy) one specific device it drives to this session - as done e.g. for drivers handling multiple devices, e.g. ahci, nvme, usb.
I will give you my situation as a specific example. I am writing a driver for a PCIe attached NIC (x86 platform). Let us say that I have 2 physical NICs in my machine with the same device ID and vendor ID. I have specified in my config file that I have a driver called "nic_drv", without specifying the PCIe address (copied from the example in repos/os/run/ping.run).
When the driver starts, I can enumerate the PCIe devices through the Platform::Connection object that is instantiated from the 'env' object. I see all PCIe devices of class 'NET' (even other NICs that I don't want my driver to handle). So far so good. I can filter through the devices by requesting the capability (with Platform::Device_client) and I can read the device ID and vendor ID and pick the devices I want to handle.
Now I have a list of several devices that I want my driver handle. If I understand you correctly, I should have only one Root object (and one Heap object). That implies I should also only call parent().announce() once. But then how do I instantiate my Nic::Session_component once per device? What is happening so far, is that some time after I call parent().announce(), my Nic::Session_component derived class gets instantiated, and the constructor is called. But I have no way of knowing which device it is meant to handle, since there is no mechanism for passing the device capability to Nic::Session_component. In addition, I only see this constructor being called once. I expected to see one constructor per PCIe device. This causes further problems such as not being able to map the mmio region since the size and base address are not known until I query the PCIe BAR, and there is no 'new' operator available, which means to me I'm doing something fundamentally wrong.
So what is the correct way to build the driver such that I get an object per device (and the object knows the device)?
Thanks, Joel