Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] bootconfig: Use hexadecimal ASCII string for size and checksum

Steven Rostedt
2020-11-19T17:42:41Z

On Thu, 19 Nov 2020 09:36:47 -0800
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 19, 2020 at 6:31 AM Masami Hiramatsu <mhiramat@kernel.org> wrote:
> >
> > Here is a seires of patches to change the bootconfig footer format
> > to use 8-bytes hexadecimal ASCII string for size and checksum instead
> > of u32.
>
> Ugh.,
>
> Just make it little-endian only.
>
> The _worst_ thing to do is to make it some kind of "native-endian",
> because then you have to deal with cross building issues etc.
>
> But using a __le32 type and just doing "le32_to_cpu()" is trivial and
> optimal - not just because everybody relevant is LE anyway, but simply
> because even if you _aren't_ LE, an unconditional byte swap is better
> than a conditional native access.

And since this isn't used in any fast paths, the byte swapping in the
kernel should be a non-issue.

-- Steve