Re: [PULL] virtio/vhost: cross endian support

[Greg Kurz <gkurz@linux.vnet.ibm.com>]

On Thu, 2 Jul 2015 08:01:28 +0200
"Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@redhat.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 01, 2015 at 12:02:50PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 1, 2015 at 2:31 AM, Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com> wrote:
> > > virtio/vhost: cross endian support
> > 
> > Ugh. Does this really have to be dynamic?
> > 
> > Can't virtio do the sane thing, and just use a _fixed_ endianness?
> > 
> > Doing a unconditional byte swap is faster and simpler than the crazy
> > conditionals. That's true regardless of endianness, but gets to be
> > even more so if the fixed endianness is little-endian, since BE is
> > not-so-slowly fading from the world.
> > 
> >                Linus
> 
> Yea, well - support for legacy BE guests on the new LE hosts is
> exactly the motivation for this.
> 
> I dislike it too, but there are two redeeming properties that
> made me merge this:
> 
> 1.  It's a trivial amount of code: since we wrap host/guest accesses
>     anyway, almost all of it is well hidden from drivers.
> 
> 2.  Sane platforms would never set flags like VHOST_CROSS_ENDIAN_LEGACY -
>     and when it's clear, there's zero overhead (as some point it was
>     tested by compiling with and without the patches, got the same
>     stripped binary).
> 
> Maybe we could create a Kconfig symbol to enforce point (2): prevent
> people from enabling it e.g. on x86. I will look into this - but it can
> be done by a patch on top, so I think this can be merged as is.
> 

This cross-endian *oddity* is targeting PowerPC book3s_64 processors... I
am not aware of any other users. Maybe create a symbol that would
be only selected by PPC_BOOK3S_64 ?


> Or do you know of someone using kernel with all config options enabled
> undiscriminately?
> 
> Thanks,
>