Re: [PATCH v2 1/6] powerpc/perf: Define big-endian version of perf_mem_data_src

Peter Zijlstra
2017-03-07T12:45:16Z

On Tue, Mar 07, 2017 at 03:28:17PM +0530, Madhavan Srinivasan wrote:
>
>
> On Monday 06 March 2017 04:52 PM, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> >On Mon, Mar 06, 2017 at 04:13:08PM +0530, Madhavan Srinivasan wrote:
> >>From: Sukadev Bhattiprolu <sukadev@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
> >>
> >>perf_mem_data_src is an union that is initialized via the ->val field
> >>and accessed via the bitmap fields. For this to work on big endian
> >>platforms, we also need a big-endian represenation of perf_mem_data_src.
> >Doesn't this break interpreting the data on a different endian machine?
>
> IIUC, we will need this patch to not to break the interpreting data
> on a different endian machine. Data collected from power8 LE/BE
> guests with this patchset applied. Kindly correct me if I missed
> your question here.

So your patch adds compile time bitfield differences. My worry was that
there was no dynamic conversion routine in the tools (it has for a lot
of other places).

This yields two questions:

- are these two static layouts identical? (seeing that you illustrate
cross-endian things working this seems likely).

- should you not have fixed this in the tool only? This patch
effectively breaks ABI on big-endian architectures.