firewire: cdev: add PHY packet transmission
Add an FW_CDEV_IOC_SEND_PHY_PACKET ioctl() for /dev/fw* which can be
used to implement bus management related functionality in userspace.
This is also half of the functionality (the transmit part) that is
needed to support a userspace implementation of a VersaPHY transaction
layer.
Safety considerations:
- PHY packets are generally broadcasts and may have interesting
effects on PHYs and the bus, e.g. make asynchronous arbitration
impossible due to too low gap count. Hence some kind of elevated
privileges should be required of a process to be able to send
PHY packets. This implementation assumes that a process that is
allowed to open the /dev/fw* of a local node does have this
privilege.
There was an inconclusive discussion about introducing POSIX
capabilities as a means to check for user privileges for these
kinds of operations.
- The kernel does not check integrity of the supplied packet data.
That would be far too much code, considering the many kinds of
PHY packets. A process which got the privilege to send these
packets is trusted to do it correctly.
Just like with the other "send packet" ioctls, a non-blocking API is
chosen; i.e. the ioctl may return even before AT DMA started. After
transmission, an event for poll()/read() is enqueued. Most users are
going to need a blocking API, but a blocking userspace wrapper is easy
to implement, and the second of the two existing libraw1394 calls
raw1394_phy_packet_write() and raw1394_start_phy_packet_write() can be
better supported that way.
Signed-off-by: Stefan Richter <stefanr@s5r6.in-berlin.de>
2 files changed