Re: The SRP initiator and the endianness of tags in SRP information units

[Roland Dreier <rdreier-FYB4Gu1CFyUAvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>]

 > I have a question about the SRP initiator available in the Linux
 > kernel. While consulting the SRP spec (r16a) I noticed that all
 > multi-byte integer fields of SRP information units must be sent using
 > the big endian byte order. This holds e.g. for the 64-bit tag fields
 > present in several information units. So I was expecting these tags to
 > be declared as __be64. However, in the header file <scsi/srp.h> these
 > tags are declared as type u64, that is, being stored in CPU order. As
 > a result, the byte order of the tags sent by the SRP initiator will
 > depend on the endianness of the CPU the SRP initiator is running on
 > (e.g. little endian on Intel CPU's, big endian on PowerPC CPU's).
 > While this doesn't harm -- an SRP target must send back the same tag
 > it received -- I found this confusing. Is this the intended behavior
 > of the SRP initiator ?

Didn't reply before... sorry.

Anyway my view is that since tags are just an opaque 64-bit quantity, it
doesn't really make sense to worry about endianness.  You wouldn't
byte-swap a field that was an 8-byte string, and the tag is essentially
the same thing.

 - R.
-- 
Roland Dreier  <rolandd-FYB4Gu1CFyUAvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>
For corporate legal information go to:
http://www.cisco.com/web/about/doing_business/legal/cri/index.html
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-rdma" in
the body of a message to majordomo-u79uwXL29TY76Z2rM5mHXA@public.gmane.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html