CAN/USB Interface Socket-CAN

[Greg KH]

On Wed, Apr 08, 2009 at 10:50:30AM +0200, Sebastian Haas wrote:
> Dear Project-Managers,
> 
> we offer a wide range of CAN PC Interfaces and would love to see our
> products being supported out of the box of the mainline kernel.
> 
> First some words about CAN. CAN (Controller Area Network) is fieldbus for
> industrial communication. Since 2.6.25 the Socket-CAN project got merged
> into the mainline kernel (drivers/net/can), it provides a generic API to
> access CAN PC Interfaces (PCI boards, USB, ISA, ...).
> 
> See also http://developer.berlios.de/projects/socketcan/
> 
> We already provide GPLv2 Linux drivers to our customers but these drivers
> use a proprietary character device interface and are far away from getting
> merged into the kernel.

Do you have a pointer to these drivers anywhere?  If we convert them to
use the proper in-kernel api, do you see a problem with them being
merged?

> In the past we have worked together with the Socket-CAN project to support
> our PCI interface (CPC-PCI) and PCMCIA interface (CPC-CARD).
> 
> We have 2 products left which must be supported, one of it is the CPC-104M
> a PC-104 CAN interfaces and the other one is the CPC-USB a USB 1.1 CAN
> interface. The CPC-104M is a pretty simple device (memory mapped access to
> the CAN controller), which we will support in Socket-CAN ourself.
> 
> The CPC-USB is a bit more trickier.

Why do you think it is trickier?

> What needs to be done:
> - porting existing driver to Socket-CAN API
> - implement power management

Sounds very reasonable, and doable.

> We provide a test device and I will be the technical contact person (I've
> wrote our Linux driver before).

Great!

So, how do you want to do this?  I suggest:
	- point us at the current drivers and we add them to the
	  staging tree
	- work on converting them to the socket-can api
	- test with the devices provided all along the way

Would that be acceptable?

thanks,

greg k-h