Re: [PATCH 0/3] New firewire stack

["Kristian Høgsberg" <krh@redhat.com>]

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