On Oct 1, 2010, at 7:14 AM, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote: > On Fri, 2010-10-01 at 07:30 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote: >> >>> From a community aspect is anyone actually going to use this? Is >> this going to be the equivalent of voyager on x86? I've got nothing >> against some of the endian clean ups this introduces. However the >> changes to misc_32.S are a bit ugly from a readability point of view. >> Just seems like this is likely to bit-rot pretty quickly. >> >> I'm with Kumar on this one. Why would we want to support this? I >> can't say I would be very willing to help anyone run in LE mode, let >> alone have it randomly selectable. > > There's some good reasons on the field ... sadly. > > At this stage this is mostly an experiment, which went pretty well in > the sense that it's actually quite easy and a lot of the "fixes" are > actually reasonable cleanups to carry. > > Now, the main reasons in practice are anything touching graphics. > > There's quite a few IP cores out there for SoCs that don't have HW > swappers, and -tons- of more or less ugly code that can't deal with non > native pixel ordering (hell, even Xorg isn't good at it, we really only > support cards that have HW swappers today). > > There's an even bigger pile of application code that deals with graphics > without any regard for endianness and is essentially unfixable. > > So it becomes a matter of potential customers that will take it if it > does LE and won't if it doesn't ... > > Now, I don't have a problem supporting that as the maintainer, as I > said, from a kernel standpoint, it's all quite easy to deal with. Some > of the most gory aspects in misc_32.S could probably be done in a way > that is slightly more readable, but the approach is actually good, I > think, to have macros to represent the high/low parts of register pairs. > > So at this stage, I'd say, let's not dismiss it just because we all come > from a long education of hating LE for the sake of it :-) > > It makes -some- sense, even if it's not necessarily on the markets > targeted by FSL today for example. At least from the kernel POV, it > doesn't seem to me to be a significant support burden at all. > > Cheers, > Ben.
I'm not against it, and I agree some of the patches seem like good clean up. I'm concerned about this bit rotting pretty quickly. - k _______________________________________________ Linuxppc-dev mailing list Linuxppc-dev@lists.ozlabs.org https://lists.ozlabs.org/listinfo/linuxppc-dev
