Re: iomapping a big endian area

[Matthew Wilcox]

On Sat, Apr 02, 2005 at 06:38:05PM -0800, David S. Miller wrote:
> > My thought on this is that we should encode the endianness of the
> > registers in the ioremap cookie.  Some architectures (sparc, I think?) can
> > do this in their PTEs.  The rest of us can do it in our ioread/writeN
> > methods.  I've planned for this in the parisc iomap implementation but
> > not actually implemented it.
> 
> SPARC64 can do it in the PTEs, but we just use raw physical
> addresses in our I/O accessors, and in those load/store instructions
> we can specify the endianness.

Ah right.  So you'd prefer an ioread8be() interface?

> Be careful though.  Endianness can be dealt with on a hardware
> level.  Consider a byte access to a 32-bit word sized config space
> datum, the PCI controller on a big-endian system will likely byte-twist
> the data lanes in order for this to work properly.

Yup, PA-RISC PCI adapters (both Dino and Elroy) do the same thing.
The 53c700 driver handles this lack of skewing by xoring the address with 3.

-- 
"Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon 
the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those
conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse
to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince 
himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep 
he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception." -- Mark Twain
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