On 9/11/25 6:36 AM, MD Danish Anwar wrote:
This patch series introduces the RPMSG Ethernet driver, which provides a virtual Ethernet interface for communication between a host processor and a remote processor using the RPMSG framework. The driver enables Ethernet-like packet transmission and reception over shared memory, facilitating inter-core communication in systems with heterogeneous processors.
This is neat and all but I have to ask: why? What does this provide that couldn't be done with normal RPMSG messages? Or from a userspace TAP/TUN driver on top of RPMSG? This also feels like some odd layering, as RPMSG sits on virtio, and we have virtio-net, couldn't we have a firmware just expose that (or would the firmware be vhost-net..)? Andrew
Key features of this driver: 1. Virtual Ethernet interface using RPMSG framework 2. Shared memory-based packet transmission and reception 3. Support for multicast address filtering 4. Dynamic MAC address assignment 5. NAPI support for efficient packet processing 6. State machine for managing interface states This driver is designed to be generic and vendor-agnostic. Vendors can develop firmware for the remote processor to make it compatible with this driver by adhering to the shared memory layout and communication protocol described in the documentation. This patch series has been tested on a TI AM64xx platform with a compatible remote processor firmware. Feedback and suggestions for improvement are welcome. Changes from v3 to v4: - Addressed comments from Parthiban Veerasooran regarding return values in patch 4/7 - Added "depends on REMOTEPROC" in Kconfig entry for RPMSG_ETH as it uses a symbol from REMOTEPROC driver. Changes from v2 to v3: - Removed the binding patches as suggested by Krzysztof Kozlowski <krzk@xxxxxxxxxx> - Dropped the rpmsg-eth node. The shared memory region is directly added to the "memory-region" in rproc device. - Added #include <linux/io.h> header for memory mapping operations - Added vendor-specific configuration through rpmsg_eth_data structure - Added shared memory region index support with shm_region_index parameter - Changed RPMSG channel name from generic "shm-eth" to vendor-specific "ti.shm-eth" - Fixed format string warning using %zu instead of %lu for size_t type - Updated Documentation to include shm_region_index - Added MAINTAINERS entry for the driver v3 https://lore.kernel.org/all/20250908090746.862407-1-danishanwar@xxxxxx/ v2 https://lore.kernel.org/all/20250902090746.3221225-1-danishanwar@xxxxxx/ v1 https://lore.kernel.org/all/20250723080322.3047826-1-danishanwar@xxxxxx/ MD Danish Anwar (7): net: rpmsg-eth: Add Documentation for RPMSG-ETH Driver net: rpmsg-eth: Add basic rpmsg skeleton net: rpmsg-eth: Register device as netdev net: rpmsg-eth: Add netdev ops net: rpmsg-eth: Add support for multicast filtering MAINTAINERS: Add entry for RPMSG Ethernet driver arch: arm64: dts: k3-am64*: Add shared memory region .../device_drivers/ethernet/index.rst | 1 + .../device_drivers/ethernet/rpmsg_eth.rst | 424 ++++++++++++ MAINTAINERS | 6 + arch/arm64/boot/dts/ti/k3-am642-evm.dts | 11 +- drivers/net/ethernet/Kconfig | 11 + drivers/net/ethernet/Makefile | 1 + drivers/net/ethernet/rpmsg_eth.c | 653 ++++++++++++++++++ drivers/net/ethernet/rpmsg_eth.h | 294 ++++++++ 8 files changed, 1399 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) create mode 100644 Documentation/networking/device_drivers/ethernet/rpmsg_eth.rst create mode 100644 drivers/net/ethernet/rpmsg_eth.c create mode 100644 drivers/net/ethernet/rpmsg_eth.h base-commit: 1f24a240974589ce42f70502ccb3ff3f5189d69a
