Re: Introduce support for little endian PowerPC

Michel Dänzer
2010-10-01T16:20:53Z

On Fre, 2010-10-01 at 22:14 +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
>
> Now, the main reasons in practice are anything touching graphics.
>
> There's quite a few IP cores out there for SoCs that don't have HW
> swappers, and -tons- of more or less ugly code that can't deal with non
> native pixel ordering (hell, even Xorg isn't good at it, we really only
> support cards that have HW swappers today).

That's not true. Even the radeon driver doesn't really need the HW
swappers anymore with KMS.

> There's an even bigger pile of application code that deals with graphics
> without any regard for endianness and is essentially unfixable.

Out of curiosity, what kind of APIs are those apps using? X11 and OpenGL
have well-defined semantics wrt endianness, allowing the drivers to
handle any necessary byte swapping internally, and IME the vast majority
of apps handle this correctly.

--
Earthling Michel Dänzer | http://www.vmware.com
Libre software enthusiast | Debian, X and DRI developer