netback is the host side counterpart to the frontend driver in
drivers/net/xen-netfront.c. The PV protocol is also implemented by
frontend drivers in other OSes too, such as the BSDs and even Windows.
The patch is based on the driver from the xen.git pvops kernel tree but
has been put through the checkpatch.pl wringer plus several manual
cleanup passes and review iterations. The driver has been moved from
drivers/xen/netback to drivers/net/xen-netback.
One major change from xen.git is that the guest transmit path (i.e. what
looks like receive to netback) has been significantly reworked to remove
the dependency on the out of tree PageForeign page flag (a core kernel
patch which enables a per page destructor callback on the final
put_page). This page flag was used in order to implement a grant map
based transmit path (where guest pages are mapped directly into SKB
frags). Instead this version of netback uses grant copy operations into
regular memory belonging to the backend domain. Reinstating the grant
map functionality is something which I would like to revisit in the
future.
Note that this driver depends on 2e820f58f7 "xen/irq: implement
bind_interdomain_evtchn_to_irqhandler for backend drivers" which is in
linux next via the "xen-two" tree and is intended for the 2.6.39 merge
window:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/konrad/xen.git stable/backends
this branch has only that single commit since 2.6.38-rc2 and is safe for
cross merging into the net branch.
Signed-off-by: Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@citrix.com>
Reviewed-by: Ben Hutchings <bhutchings@solarflare.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Ian Campbell