Re: [PATCH] libata-sff: Don't call bmdma_stop on non DMA capable controllers

[Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com>]

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 26 Jan 2007, David Woodhouse wrote:
>> You're thinking of MMIO, while the case we were discussing was PIO. My
>> laptop is perfectly happy to assign PIO resources from zero.
> 
> I was indeed thinking MMIO, but I really think it should extend to PIO 
> also. It certainly is (again) true on PC's, where the low IO space is 
> special and reserved for motherboard/system devices.

Via the even-less-of-an-excuse-than-you-thought department:

Many (most?) non-x86 handle PIO via special mappings and additional 
serialization instructions, but otherwise treat PIO register space in a 
very similar manner to MMIO.

Thus, it's /easier/ on non-x86 to ensure that PIO addresses never land 
at zero, because you must remap /anyway/.  It's only on x86 that PIO 
register spaces are accessed by vastly different CPU instructions.  Most 
other arches convert PIO accesses into massage+mmio R/W+massage.

On sparc64, for example, after I pointed this out to DaveM, he was able 
to implement the new iomap interface without the 'if (pio-mem-area)' 
branch present on x86.

	Jeff