On Mon, Jun 17, 2019 at 8:39 PM Samuel Mendoza-Jonas sam@mendozajonas.com wrote:
This introduces support for the NC-SI protocol, modelled as a phy driver for other ethernet drivers to consume.
NC-SI (Network Controller Sideband Interface) is a protocol to manage a sideband connection to a proper network interface, for example a BMC (Baseboard Management Controller) sharing the NIC of the host system. Probing and configuration occurs by communicating with the "remote" NIC via NC-SI control frames (Ethernet header 0x88f8).
This implementation is roughly based on the upstream Linux implementation[0], with a reduced feature set and an emphasis on getting a link up as fast as possible rather than probing the full possible topology of the bus. The current phy model relies on the network being "up", sending NC-SI command frames via net_send_packet() and receiving them from the net_loop() loop (added in a following patch).
The ncsi-pkt.h header[1] is copied from the Linux kernel for consistent field definitions.
Signed-off-by: Samuel Mendoza-Jonas sam@mendozajonas.com
Acked-by: Joe Hershberger joe.hershberger@ni.com