Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 00/17] pci: switch a ton of drivers to symbolic names

[Glauber Costa <glommer@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 4:09 PM, Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com> wrote:
> The recent e1000 bug made the important of using
> symbolic macros for pci config access clear for me.
> So I started going over drivers and converting
> to symbolic constants instead of hard-coded ones.
> I did a large part until I run out of steam.
> Maybe some brave soul will take up converting
> the rest of them, or maybe I will: note that
> when converting bridges one should be careful
> to use bridge macros where appropriate.
>
> Instead of testing a huge number of configurations,
> I compared binaries before and after conversion.
> Almost all of them generate exact same stripped binary
> before and after the change.
> The only object changed was eepro100, objdump showed
> that the change was because gcc for some reason
> decides to use a bit more stack for init function
> after comments are added there.
>
> This methodology was the reason that I added TODOs where I saw
> deviations from spec or other code ugliness, will have to be fixed
> separately.
>

IMHO, this is a huge enhancement.

I myself was found expending huge amounts of time trying do figure out the
meaning of some specific constants in the past.

+1

-- 
Glauber  Costa.
"Free as in Freedom"
http://glommer.net

"The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act."