RE: [PATCH v1] asm-generic: introduce be56 unaligned accessors

[David Laight <David.Laight@ACULAB.COM>]

From: Arnd Bergmann
> Sent: 07 October 2024 15:45
> On Mon, Oct 7, 2024, at 14:40, Marius.Cristea@microchip.com wrote:
> > On Sun, 2024-09-29 at 21:16 +0000, David Laight wrote:
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> >> From: marius.cristea@microchip.com
> >> > Sent: 27 September 2024 09:36
> >> >
> >> > The PAC194X, IIO driver, is using some unaligned 56 bit registers.
> >> > Provide some helper accessors in preparation for the new driver.
> >>
> >> Someone please shoot the hardware engineer ;-)
> >>
> >> Do separate unaligned access of the first 4 bytes and last four
> >> bytes.
> >> It can't matter if the middle byte is accessed twice.
> >>
> >> Or, for reads read 8 bytes from 'p & ~1ul' and then fixup
> >> the value.
> >>
> >
> > Do you recommend me to drop this patch?
> >
> > I know that there are some "workarounds", but those didn't "looks"
> > nice. I was using that function locally and I got a suggestion from the
> > IIO subsystem maintainer to move it into the kernel in order for others
> > to used it.
> 
> My feeling is that this is too specific to one driver, I don't
> expect it to be shared much. I also suspect that most 56-bit
> integers in data structures are actually always part of a naturally
> aligned 64-bit word. If that is the case here, the driver can
> probably better access it as a normal 64-bit number and mask
> out the upper 56 bits using the include/linux/bitfield.h helpers.

Or get the compiler to do it for you.
This DTRT https://www.godbolt.org/z/GMdePjYMY:

struct foo {
    unsigned long a;
    unsigned char b;
    unsigned long c:56 __attribute__((packed));
    unsigned long d;
};

Although you'll need #define htobe56(x) (htobe64(x) >> 8) on LE.

	David

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