Re: [PATCH] Add iwlwifi wireless drivers [part 2/2]

[Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com>]

On Fri, 18 May 2007 13:33:57 -0700 James Ketrenos wrote:

> > 2.  Use of bitfields:  bitfields are not (guaranteed to be) portable
> > across a wire interface to some other CPU architecture.
> > Are all bitfield uses always local to the running driver?
> > They should be.
> 
> The bitfields are between the hw/ucode (__le) and the driver.  Are you saying the bitfields won't be compatible if the driver is compiled and running on big endian?  Shouldn't le16_to_cpu() fix that?  I just noticed the types in iwl-4965-hw.h weren't endian specific; I've updated that (u16, u32, u64 -> __le16, __le32, __le64)


I'm just saying that something like
	struct bits {
		u32	priority :4;
		u32	flags :12;
		u32	direction :1;
		u32	status :15;
	};
when built on x86[-64] and then sent over a network connection
to a big-endian machine won't necessarily be looked at correctly
on the receiving machine.  There is no guarantee of bitfield order
from one platform to another.

> > 3.  What are all of those "volatile" C keywords doing in struct
> > iwl_shared?
> > See http://lwn.net/Articles/232961/ : "The trouble with volatile"
> 
> If a reference shared through memory mapped IO with a device that can change the value at any time, doesn't it need to be volatile?  'struct iwl_shared' is allocated with pci_alloc_consistent and the physical address is provided to the hardware for it to update whenever it sees fit.

That's a good question.  You probably know as much about it as I do.

Does the driver access those mmIO regions by something direct like
	*mmio =
or does the driver use some kind of access routines to read/write
the mmIO regions, such as readb()/writeb()?

If the former, then I expect that those should be changed/fixed,
but I'd prefer to have Jeff G. answer that if he would.


> > 4.  Don't list the parameters like this:
> 
> Lindent == bad.  I've fixed the instances of this munging I've come across.

Indeed.  Too bad.

> > 8.  Too many BUG_ON()s.  Try to recover or return -ERRORs instead.
> 
> I pulled out two that shouldn't have been there.
> 
> The rest are currently there map to bugs which are easily introduced through code changes but which may not cause an immediately visible bug at run-time.  Typically they are placed where an eventual printk() at that location during debugging of a user bug resulted in the critical "ah-ha!" that led to fixing it.  I've added comments to the BUG_ON's that didn't have comments already.
> 
> I suppose we could try and introduce a new driver recovery mechanism that, upon detection, throws a stack trace and then shuts down the driver (vs. throwing a kernel OOPs) requiring user space to unload and reload the driver.  That would still be a sucky situation, but at least it wouldn't cause a system failure requiring a reboot...  does such a mechanism already exist?

You can call dump_stack() or use WARN_ON(), but you'll have roll your
own shut-down-the-driver methods AFAIK.

---
~Randy
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