- The MEN Chameleon Bus is an artificial bus system that attaches to a so
- called Chameleon FPGA device found on some hardware produced my MEN Mikro
- Elektronik GmbH. These devices are multi-function devices implemented in a
- single FPGA and usually attached via some sort of PCI or PCIe link. Each
- FPGA contains a header section describing the content of the FPGA. The
- header lists the device id, PCI BAR, offset from the beginning of the PCI
- BAR, size in the FPGA, interrupt number and some other properties currently
- not handled by the MCB implementation.
-
-2.2 Carrier Devices
+
+This document is intended to be a short overview of the current
+implementation and does by no means describe the complete possibilities of MCB
+based devices.
+
+Limitations of the current implementation
+-----------------------------------------
+
+The current implementation is limited to PCI and PCIe based carrier devices
+that only use a single memory resource and share the PCI legacy IRQ. Not
+implemented are:
+
+- Multi-resource MCB devices like the VME Controller or M-Module carrier.
+- MCB devices that need another MCB device, like SRAM for a DMA Controller's
+ buffer descriptors or a video controller's video memory.
+- A per-carrier IRQ domain for carrier devices that have one (or more) IRQs
+ per MCB device like PCIe based carriers with MSI or MSI-X support.
+
+Architecture
+============
+
+MCB is divided into 3 functional blocks:
+
+- The MEN Chameleon Bus itself,
+- drivers for MCB Carrier Devices and
+- the parser for the Chameleon table.
+
+MEN Chameleon Bus
+-----------------
+
+The MEN Chameleon Bus is an artificial bus system that attaches to a so
+called Chameleon FPGA device found on some hardware produced my MEN Mikro
+Elektronik GmbH. These devices are multi-function devices implemented in a
+single FPGA and usually attached via some sort of PCI or PCIe link. Each
+FPGA contains a header section describing the content of the FPGA. The
+header lists the device id, PCI BAR, offset from the beginning of the PCI
+BAR, size in the FPGA, interrupt number and some other properties currently
+not handled by the MCB implementation.
+
+Carrier Devices
+---------------
+
+A carrier device is just an abstraction for the real world physical bus the
+Chameleon FPGA is attached to. Some IP Core drivers may need to interact with
+properties of the carrier device (like querying the IRQ number of a PCI
+device). To provide abstraction from the real hardware bus, an MCB carrier
+device provides callback methods to translate the driver's MCB function calls
+to hardware related function calls. For example a carrier device may
+implement the get_irq() method which can be translated into a hardware bus
+query for the IRQ number the device should use.
+
+Parser
+------
+
+The parser reads the first 512 bytes of a Chameleon device and parses the
+Chameleon table. Currently the parser only supports the Chameleon v2 variant
+of the Chameleon table but can easily be adopted to support an older or
+possible future variant. While parsing the table's entries new MCB devices
+are allocated and their resources are assigned according to the resource
+assignment in the Chameleon table. After resource assignment is finished, the
+MCB devices are registered at the MCB and thus at the driver core of the
+Linux kernel.
+
+Resource handling
+=================
+
+The current implementation assigns exactly one memory and one IRQ resource
+per MCB device. But this is likely going to change in the future.
+
+Memory Resources
+----------------
+
+Each MCB device has exactly one memory resource, which can be requested from
+the MCB bus. This memory resource is the physical address of the MCB device
+inside the carrier and is intended to be passed to ioremap() and friends. It
+is already requested from the kernel by calling request_mem_region().
+
+IRQs
+----
+
+Each MCB device has exactly one IRQ resource, which can be requested from the
+MCB bus. If a carrier device driver implements the ->get_irq() callback
+method, the IRQ number assigned by the carrier device will be returned,
+otherwise the IRQ number inside the Chameleon table will be returned. This
+number is suitable to be passed to request_irq().
+
+Writing an MCB driver
+=====================
+
+The driver structure