From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Michael S. Tsirkin" Subject: Re: [PULL] virtio/vhost: cross endian support Date: Thu, 2 Jul 2015 08:01:28 +0200 Message-ID: <20150702071412-mutt-send-email-mst@redhat.com> References: <20150701113150-mutt-send-email-mst@redhat.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Sender: virtualization-bounces@lists.linux-foundation.org Errors-To: virtualization-bounces@lists.linux-foundation.org To: Linus Torvalds Cc: KVM list , Network Development , Linux Kernel Mailing List , virtualization List-Id: virtualization@lists.linuxfoundation.org On Wed, Jul 01, 2015 at 12:02:50PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Wed, Jul 1, 2015 at 2:31 AM, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote: > > virtio/vhost: cross endian support > > Ugh. Does this really have to be dynamic? > > Can't virtio do the sane thing, and just use a _fixed_ endianness? > > Doing a unconditional byte swap is faster and simpler than the crazy > conditionals. That's true regardless of endianness, but gets to be > even more so if the fixed endianness is little-endian, since BE is > not-so-slowly fading from the world. > > Linus Yea, well - support for legacy BE guests on the new LE hosts is exactly the motivation for this. I dislike it too, but there are two redeeming properties that made me merge this: 1. It's a trivial amount of code: since we wrap host/guest accesses anyway, almost all of it is well hidden from drivers. 2. Sane platforms would never set flags like VHOST_CROSS_ENDIAN_LEGACY - and when it's clear, there's zero overhead (as some point it was tested by compiling with and without the patches, got the same stripped binary). Maybe we could create a Kconfig symbol to enforce point (2): prevent people from enabling it e.g. on x86. I will look into this - but it can be done by a patch on top, so I think this can be merged as is. Or do you know of someone using kernel with all config options enabled undiscriminately? Thanks, -- MST