On Thu, Feb 05, 2004 at 02:09:09PM -0800, Leonid Grossman wrote:

It looks like for the swapper issue we can get rid of PPC64-specific
code, but not necessarily of big-endian-specific code.

right

The behavior you describe is generic for Linux but not for the platform
- on the same box, another OS will not byteswap, for example on the same
pSeries box AIX will not byteswap while Linux will.

While I understand the desire to share the same driver across OSs,
providing "glue" code like sym53c8xx_2 drivers does can be very ugly.
You might look at that driver a bit and try to compare 2.4 vs 2.6.

So, our ASIC is designed in a way that for a big endian machine the
swapper control need not be touched, and for little endian box both
register and DMA accesses have to be configured to swap - it would be
nice to have the same configuration working on all systems, but this did
not seem possible.

It's probably not. It sounds like the Tigon2 driver (acenic) which has
similar HW support. You see how endianess is handled there.

...

Another small difference will be that the ASIC has actually slightly
different statistic counters for  big and little endian.
We can move these (very few) big/little definition into a header file so
the source itself is clean, but I don't see a way to completely get rid
of these... 

that's ok I think.

cheers,
grant