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1Freescale DPAA2 Ethernet driver
2===============================
3
4This file provides documentation for the Freescale DPAA2 Ethernet driver.
5
6
7Contents
8========
9	Supported Platforms
10	Architecture Overview
11	Creating a Network Interface
12	Features & Offloads
13
14
15Supported Platforms
16===================
17This driver provides networking support for Freescale DPAA2 SoCs, e.g.
18LS2080A, LS2088A, LS1088A.
19
20
21Architecture Overview
22=====================
23Unlike regular NICs, in the DPAA2 architecture there is no single hardware block
24representing network interfaces; instead, several separate hardware resources
25concur to provide the networking functionality:
26        - network interfaces
27        - queues, channels
28        - buffer pools
29        - MAC/PHY
30
31All hardware resources are allocated and configured through the Management
32Complex (MC) portals. MC abstracts most of these resources as DPAA2 objects
33and exposes ABIs through which they can be configured and controlled. A few
34hardware resources, like queues, do not have a corresponding MC object and
35are treated as internal resources of other objects.
36
37For a more detailed description of the DPAA2 architecture and its object
38abstractions see:
39	drivers/staging/fsl-mc/README.txt
40
41Each Linux net device is built on top of a Datapath Network Interface (DPNI)
42object and uses Buffer Pools (DPBPs), I/O Portals (DPIOs) and Concentrators
43(DPCONs).
44
45Configuration interface:
46
47                 -----------------------
48                | DPAA2 Ethernet Driver |
49                 -----------------------
50                     .      .      .
51                     .      .      .
52             . . . . .      .      . . . . . .
53             .              .                .
54             .              .                .
55         ----------     ----------      -----------
56        | DPBP API |   | DPNI API |    | DPCON API |
57         ----------     ----------      -----------
58             .              .                .             software
59===========  .  ==========  .  ============  .  ===================
60             .              .                .             hardware
61         ------------------------------------------
62        |            MC hardware portals           |
63         ------------------------------------------
64             .              .                .
65             .              .                .
66          ------         ------            -------
67         | DPBP |       | DPNI |          | DPCON |
68          ------         ------            -------
69
70The DPNIs are network interfaces without a direct one-on-one mapping to PHYs.
71DPBPs represent hardware buffer pools. Packet I/O is performed in the context
72of DPCON objects, using DPIO portals for managing and communicating with the
73hardware resources.
74
75Datapath (I/O) interface:
76
77         -----------------------------------------------
78        |           DPAA2 Ethernet Driver               |
79          -----------------------------------------------
80          |          ^        ^         |            |
81          |          |        |         |            |
82   enqueue|   dequeue|   data |  dequeue|       seed |
83    (Tx)  | (Rx, TxC)|  avail.|  request|     buffers|
84          |          |  notify|         |            |
85          |          |        |         |            |
86          V          |        |         V            V
87         -----------------------------------------------
88        |                 DPIO Driver                   |
89         -----------------------------------------------
90          |          |        |         |            |          software
91          |          |        |         |            |  ================
92          |          |        |         |            |          hardware
93         -----------------------------------------------
94        |               I/O hardware portals            |
95         -----------------------------------------------
96          |          ^        ^         |            |
97          |          |        |         |            |
98          |          |        |         V            |
99          V          |    ================           V
100        ----------------------           |      -------------
101 queues  ----------------------          |     | Buffer pool |
102          ----------------------         |      -------------
103                   =======================
104                                Channel
105
106Datapath I/O (DPIO) portals provide enqueue and dequeue services, data
107availability notifications and buffer pool management. DPIOs are shared between
108all DPAA2 objects (and implicitly all DPAA2 kernel drivers) that work with data
109frames, but must be affine to the CPUs for the purpose of traffic distribution.
110
111Frames are transmitted and received through hardware frame queues, which can be
112grouped in channels for the purpose of hardware scheduling. The Ethernet driver
113enqueues TX frames on egress queues and after transmission is complete a TX
114confirmation frame is sent back to the CPU.
115
116When frames are available on ingress queues, a data availability notification
117is sent to the CPU; notifications are raised per channel, so even if multiple
118queues in the same channel have available frames, only one notification is sent.
119After a channel fires a notification, is must be explicitly rearmed.
120
121Each network interface can have multiple Rx, Tx and confirmation queues affined
122to CPUs, and one channel (DPCON) for each CPU that services at least one queue.
123DPCONs are used to distribute ingress traffic to different CPUs via the cores'
124affine DPIOs.
125
126The role of hardware buffer pools is storage of ingress frame data. Each network
127interface has a privately owned buffer pool which it seeds with kernel allocated
128buffers.
129
130
131DPNIs are decoupled from PHYs; a DPNI can be connected to a PHY through a DPMAC
132object or to another DPNI through an internal link, but the connection is
133managed by MC and completely transparent to the Ethernet driver.
134
135     ---------     ---------     ---------
136    | eth if1 |   | eth if2 |   | eth ifn |
137     ---------     ---------     ---------
138          .           .          .
139          .           .          .
140          .           .          .
141         ---------------------------
142        |   DPAA2 Ethernet Driver   |
143         ---------------------------
144          .           .          .
145          .           .          .
146          .           .          .
147       ------      ------      ------            -------
148      | DPNI |    | DPNI |    | DPNI |          | DPMAC |----+
149       ------      ------      ------            -------     |
150         |           |           |                  |        |
151         |           |           |                  |      -----
152          ===========             ==================      | PHY |
153                                                           -----
154
155Creating a Network Interface
156============================
157A net device is created for each DPNI object probed on the MC bus. Each DPNI has
158a number of properties which determine the network interface configuration
159options and associated hardware resources.
160
161DPNI objects (and the other DPAA2 objects needed for a network interface) can be
162added to a container on the MC bus in one of two ways: statically, through a
163Datapath Layout Binary file (DPL) that is parsed by MC at boot time; or created
164dynamically at runtime, via the DPAA2 objects APIs.
165
166
167Features & Offloads
168===================
169Hardware checksum offloading is supported for TCP and UDP over IPv4/6 frames.
170The checksum offloads can be independently configured on RX and TX through
171ethtool.
172
173Hardware offload of unicast and multicast MAC filtering is supported on the
174ingress path and permanently enabled.
175
176Scatter-gather frames are supported on both RX and TX paths. On TX, SG support
177is configurable via ethtool; on RX it is always enabled.
178
179The DPAA2 hardware can process jumbo Ethernet frames of up to 10K bytes.
180
181The Ethernet driver defines a static flow hashing scheme that distributes
182traffic based on a 5-tuple key: src IP, dst IP, IP proto, L4 src port,
183L4 dst port. No user configuration is supported for now.
184
185Hardware specific statistics for the network interface as well as some
186non-standard driver stats can be consulted through ethtool -S option.
187