[PATCH v2] ARM: tlb: ASID macro should give 32bit result for BE correct operation

Ben Dooks ben.dooks at codethink.co.uk
Tue Oct 8 03:09:51 EDT 2013


On 08/10/13 02:55, Kim Phillips wrote:
> On Mon, 7 Oct 2013 18:49:20 -0400
> Santosh Shilimkar<santosh.shilimkar at ti.com>  wrote:
>
>> On Monday 07 October 2013 12:37 PM, Victor Kamensky wrote:
>>> On 7 October 2013 08:57, Ben Dooks<ben.dooks at codethink.co.uk>  wrote:
>>>> On 07/10/13 17:48, Victor Kamensky wrote:
>>>> If you are booting on the Arndale board, is there a patch to mark
>>>> the relevant Exynos devices as BE capable?
>>>
>>> Arndale need massive fixes in their BSP layer to be endian agnostic
>>> ARM V7 platform. Unfortunate it is not as simple as with few others
>>> that already marked as BE capable.
>>>
>>> Please see
>>> https://git.linaro.org/gitweb?p=people/victor.kamensky/linux-linaro-tracking-be.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/llct-be-topic
>>> Mostly it is __raw_xxx conversion to xxx_relaxed, but there are
>
> apologies if this was explained earlier in the thread, but what has
> __raw_xxx ->  xxx_relaxed have to do with endianness?  the relaxed
> accessor variants allow the compiler to reorder the instruction: it's
> got nothing to do with byte swapping the data, no?
>
>>> I think above position is consistent with similar discussion on
>>> some of BE related threads - changing BSP to support BE mode
>>> is BSP owners call.
>>>
>> Am just wondering a better method than the patch [1] which touches
>> many drivers for readl/writel() replacement. Drivers are using
>> that as standard based on device driver guide and was thinking
>> we should not change that rule to support BE. We definitely need
>
> I think readl/writel were originally devised for accessing PCI devices
> (else why would readl's definition include an __le32_to_cpu byteswap)?
> In any case, this makes read/writel incompatible with big endian
> devices.

Generally, in ARM, the devices stay little endian when the CPU is
running big endian, therefore we need this in there.

If we end up having to change all the drivers, then this series
is going to become a huge incovenience to everyone and at that
point it will probably be better to drop it.

>> to get the byte swap achieved but probably through some other
>> means.
>
> back when I looked into this, I found in/out_be32() accessors were Power
> arch centric, read/writel ARM arch centric, whereas ioread/writebe32
> were available in other arches.  See e.g., upstream commit
> 0c69fb037a6bb1faf06ea776872da54a6705c154 "mtd: fsl_ifc_nand: use more
> portable i/o accessors".

readl and writel should work pretty much everywhere.

I'm not sure if device drivers /should/ know much about what
endian bus or the endian-ness of the peripheral they are managing,
especially if we have the case the bus-bus bridge is doing a swap.

Personally, I'd just like to rip out the IO accessors we have at
the moment and just replace it with a much more BSD like system
where the device struct provides a set of accessor functions. Then
if we are on strange busses, or multi-function devices, or the
latest in inter-periphreal connect we don't have to keep re-working
drivers.

It'd even make regmap nicer as it could sit in a layer below any
device and would not need and explicit changes for a driver to use
it.

> Kim
>
>> [1] https://git.linaro.org/gitweb?p=people/victor.kamensky/linux-linaro-tracking-be.git;a=commit;h=9074a67ab082c62545683e5ec909368a23c33655
>
> if anything, a patch with 'endian fix' in the subject would be
> *removing* sparse endianness warnings, not leaving them the same.

A few warnings are better than a system that does not work.

-- 
Ben Dooks				http://www.codethink.co.uk/
Senior Engineer				Codethink - Providing Genius



More information about the linux-arm-kernel mailing list