Re: [Linux-fbdev-devel] [PATCH 1/2] fb: add support for foreign endianness

Benjamin Herrenschmidt
2008-02-20T20:40:00Z

On Wed, 2008-02-20 at 15:18 +0300, Anton Vorontsov wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 11:56:35AM +1100, Paul Mackerras wrote:
> > Andrew Morton writes:
> >
> > > Bizarrely, the original author of the patch (Anton) has fallen off the cc.
> > > Could whoever did that please thwap himself?
> > >
> > > Anyway, my head is now officially spinning. Did anyone actually have a
> > > reason why we shouldn't proceed with Anton's patch?
> >
> > I was wondering if it would be sufficient to provide alternative
> > versions of fb_readl, fb_writel etc. that do byte-swapping.
>
> This is of course viable alternative. And I was considering this, but
> later I abandoned the idea: that way we'll end up doing math in the
> native endianness and then converting it to the foreign. This feels
> ugly in contrast when we can do the right math in the first place, per
> framebuffer.

Also, the type of swap to do in fb_readl/writel would have to depend
on the bit depth which is kind of ugly.

> > That
> > would mean that all framebuffers would have to have the same
> > endianness,
>
> Yup, another downside of changing the code to fix some narrow
> problem. Plus, this means things will break if/when we'll attach
> PCI video card into the MPC8360E-RDK.

Right.

Ben.