Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1752843AbZA1To5 (ORCPT ); Wed, 28 Jan 2009 14:44:57 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751120AbZA1Tos (ORCPT ); Wed, 28 Jan 2009 14:44:48 -0500 Received: from smtp1.linux-foundation.org ([140.211.169.13]:37244 "EHLO smtp1.linux-foundation.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750979AbZA1Tos (ORCPT ); Wed, 28 Jan 2009 14:44:48 -0500 Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2009 11:44:13 -0800 (PST) From: Linus Torvalds X-X-Sender: torvalds@localhost.localdomain To: Harvey Harrison cc: "H. Peter Anvin" , Arnd Bergmann , Jaswinder Singh Rajput , Ingo Molnar , Linux Kernel Mailing List , Andrew Morton , Sam Ravnborg , Jaswinder Singh Rajput , "David S. Miller" Subject: Re: [mingo@elte.hu: [git pull] headers_check fixes] In-Reply-To: <1233170532.6717.49.camel@brick> Message-ID: References: <20090127222825.GA27097@elte.hu> <1233106614.3256.6.camel@localhost.localdomain> <200901281337.52294.arnd@arndb.de> <49809A65.2090501@kernel.org> <1233170532.6717.49.camel@brick> User-Agent: Alpine 2.00 (LFD 1167 2008-08-23) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1126 Lines: 27 On Wed, 28 Jan 2009, Harvey Harrison wrote: > On Wed, 2009-01-28 at 09:48 -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote: > > > > In general, no. The byteswap API is a legacy exception. > > But now that swab.h has been separated out, we could just stop exporting the > asm/swab.h bits while still providing a generic C-based implementation to > userspace. Well, the _reason_ the byteswap stuff has been interesting to user space is that the kernel did it better than the alternatives. Rather than having purely "work with big-endian data" (the networking htonl etc functions), the kernel had good and fairly optimized handling of various different forms of byte order handling. Which is why people wanted to use it in the first place - and which is why then doing just the generic C-based thing doesn't really fix the issue. Things may compile, but they kind of lost the point. Linus -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/