Re: [PATCH 0/3] New firewire stack

Kristian Høgsberg
2006-12-05T16:46:23Z

David Miller wrote:
> From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
> Date: Tue, 05 Dec 2006 16:42:42 +1100
>
>> - It's horribly broken in at least two area :
>>
>> DO NOT USE BITFIELDS FOR DATA ON THE WIRE !!!
>>
>> and
>>
>> Where do you handle endianness ? (no need to shout for
>> that one).
>>
>> (Or in general, do not use bitfields period ....)
>
> Yes, this is a show stopper, the endianness and
> word-size/endian testing should have been done before
> submission.

I guess my mistake here was to present it as a patch submission. I
acknowledged in my cover letter that it wasn't feature complete and I'm not
pushing for inclusion just yet. I'm very much aware of the point that when
replacing a subsystem like this, the new code has to be as good as the old
code. In that respect, the patches I posted are lacking in other areas
(isochronous streaming is the big one) that will take more work to fix than
just making it work on big-endian and 64-bit architectures. It's still a work
in progress.

Having said that, I've been working on this for a while now, and I wanted to
announce the effort and open the discussion about replacing the old stack.
Something about "release early, release often"... :) Anyway, I've moved the
portability issues to the top of my list now.

Kristian