[patch 0/8] staging: Drivers to support Unisys Secure Partitioning

[Ken Cox]

On 03/03/2014 01:12 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 03, 2014 at 11:01:14AM -0600, Ken Cox wrote:
>> This series includes a base set of drivers for the Unisys s-Par system.
>> This set of drivers is enough to get a virtual guest up and running on s-Par
>> hardware.  The remaining drivers needed to have a fully functional system
>> will be submitted after review of this initial set.
>>
>> s-Par is firmware that provides hardware partitioning capabilities for
>> splitting large-scale Intel x86 servers into multiple isolated
>> partitions. s-Par provides a set of para-virtualized device drivers to
>> allow guest partitions on the same server to share devices that  would
>> normally be unsharable; specifically, PCI network interfaces and host
>> bus adapters that do not support shared access via SR-IOV. The shared
>> device is owned and managed by a small, single-purpose service
>> partition, which communicates with each guest partition sharing that
>> device through an area of shared memory called a channel. Additional
>> drivers provide support interfaces for communicating with s-Par
>> services, logging and diagnostics, and accessing the Linux console
>> from the s-Par user interface.
>>
>> The driver stack consists of a set of support modules, a set of bus
>> modules, and a set of device driver modules. The support modules
>> handle a number of common functions across each of the other
>> drivers. The bus modules provide organization for the device driver
>> modules, which provide the shared device functionality.
>>
>> These drivers are for the Unisys virtual PCI hardware model where the
>> hypervisor need not intervene (other than normal interrupt handling)
>> in the interactions between the client drivers and the virtual adapter
>> firmware in the adapter service partition.
> Why do you want these in the drivers/staging/ part of the kernel?  I
> have my guesses, but you need to tell me why :)
Frankly, I wasn't sure of the most appropriate place since this is a 
conglomeration of drivers for hba, serial, video, etc. but they don't 
stand alone outside of the s-PAR environment.  If you can recommend a 
better place for them I'll be happy to move them over.
>
> Also, I need a TODO file, like the rest of the staging drivers have,
> listing what needs to be done to get the code out of staging, and who is
> responsible for the code.  Ideally, a MAINTAINERS entry as well, so that
> the same people get copied when people use scripts/get_maintainer.pl on
> patches.
sorry about that.  I'll add them.
>
> thanks,
>
> greg k-h