Subject: Re: [Linux-fbdev-devel] [PATCH 1/2] fb: add support for foreign
	endianness
From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
Reply-To: benh@kernel.crashing.org
To: avorontsov@ru.mvista.com
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>,
       Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
       Clemens Koller <clemens.koller@anagramm.de>,
       linux-fbdev-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, adaplas@gmail.com,
       Krzysztof Helt <krzysztof.h1@poczta.fm>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
       linuxppc-dev@ozlabs.org, Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org>
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Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2008 07:38:40 +1100
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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.

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