From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: David Miller Subject: Re: [PATCH][BNX2X] round three Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2007 12:42:05 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <20071015.124205.98881309.davem@davemloft.net> References: <1192462049.29746.158.camel@eliezer> <20071015160512.GA15178@one.firstfloor.org> <1192465323.29746.170.camel@eliezer> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: andi@firstfloor.org, netdev@vger.kernel.org, jeff@garzik.org, mchan@broadcom.com To: eliezert@broadcom.com Return-path: Received: from 74-93-104-97-Washington.hfc.comcastbusiness.net ([74.93.104.97]:35813 "EHLO sunset.davemloft.net" rhost-flags-OK-FAIL-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1756276AbXJOTmB (ORCPT ); Mon, 15 Oct 2007 15:42:01 -0400 In-Reply-To: <1192465323.29746.170.camel@eliezer> Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org From: "Eliezer Tamir" Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2007 18:22:03 +0200 > On Mon, 2007-10-15 at 18:05 +0200, Andi Kleen wrote: > > > This is not a driver issue. > > > Unfortunately, the firmware code is different for LE and BE machines. > > > We had issues with the BE firmware that appear to be resolved. > > > Hopefully, the next version will have both. > > > > If the firmware is big it might be better to just add the necessary > > conversions to the driver and always use BE. Endian conversions > > tend to be very cheap. > > For a given architecture, only the right version of the microcode is > compiled, so the binary only contains one copy of the microcode. But it still takes up source tree space. > The good news is that future versions of the device will not have this > issue. > The better news is that you only need the little-endian firmware even with these chips, simple assume little-endian for all chip shared data-structures and swap in the driver as we've explained to you. The cost for big-endian cpus is almost nothing.