Re: [PATCH v2 1/4] rust: io: Add big-endian read and write functions

Danilo Krummrich
2026-02-05T19:05:22Z

On Thu Feb 5, 2026 at 6:28 PM CET, Daniel Almeida wrote:
>> On 5 Feb 2026, at 12:16, Gary Guo <gary@garyguo.net> wrote:
>> I think we should have everything default to little endian, and have wrapper
>> types that do big endian which require expicit construction, similar to
>> RelaxedMmio in Alex's series.
>
> Ah yes, the RelaxedMmio pattern is definitely a good one. I agree that we
> should head in this direction.

I strongly disagree.

This is a great pattern for relaxed ordering because:

(1) We need both strict and relaxed ordering.

(2) Relaxed ordering is rare, hence it doesn't hurt to write e.g.

io.relaxed().write()

(3) If you by accident just write

io.write()

i.e. forget to call relaxed() it s not a bug, nothing bad happens.

Whereas for endianness it is a bad pattern because:

(1) Devices are either little-endian or big-endian. Hence, having to write

io.big_endian().write()

is excessive, we always want big-endian for a big-endian device.

(2) It is error prone, if you forget to call big_endian() first, it is a bug.

(3) It is unergonomic in combination with relaxed ordering.

io.big_endian().relaxed().write()

(Does the other way around work as well? :)

It makes much more sense to define once when we request the I/O memory whether
the device is litte-endian or big-endian.

This could be done with different request functions, a const generic or a
function argument, but it should be done at request time.