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From: olof@lixom•net (Olof Johansson)
To: Timur Tabi <timur@freescale•com>
Cc: linuxppc-dev@ozlabs•org, sl@powerlinux•fr,
	Philippe Lachenal <philippe.lachenal@hotmail•fr>
Subject: Re: MPC8349ea Random Device Generator driver
Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2007 10:20:41 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20070607152041.GA2851@lixom.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <466814E7.3090101@freescale.com>

On Thu, Jun 07, 2007 at 09:23:35AM -0500, Timur Tabi wrote:
> Olof Johansson wrote:
> >On Wed, Jun 06, 2007 at 05:32:19PM -0500, Timur Tabi wrote:
> >>Olof Johansson wrote:
> >>
> >>> - you can never assign a __le16 type to any other integer type or any 
> >>>   other bitwise type. You'd get a warnign about incompatible types. 
> >>>   Makes sense, no?
> >>Then why do the in_be functions return an unsigned int instead of a __be 
> >>type?  Isn't that effectively removing the endian-ness from the type?
> >
> >Because they read a big endian register and returns the contents in the
> >native byte order for the machine.
> 
> In other words, the in_le16() function exists so that we can "assign a 
> __le16 type to any other integer type or any other bitwise type."

No. in_le16 exists so you can read a little-endian 16 bit register on
a device, and store it to a regular 16-bit integer variable. It
has nothing to do with assignment.

__le16 is just a type with hints for the programmer: "Hey, this is a
16-bit variable, but we're storing it in little-endian format. So if you
need to use it as a native data type, you need to swap it by hand first",
and sparse is able to help you find places where you didn't.

If you use the accessors to read/write hardware (as you are supposed to
do), then you don't need special types in your structs, just make sure
you use the right accessors.

-Olof

  reply	other threads:[~2007-06-07 15:14 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 21+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2007-06-05 15:42 MPC8349ea Random Device Generator driver Philippe Lachenal
2007-06-06 14:15 ` Arnd Bergmann
2007-06-07 11:29   ` MPC8349ea Random Number " Philippe Lachenal
2007-06-07 14:03     ` Arnd Bergmann
2007-06-06 21:57 ` MPC8349ea Random Device " Timur Tabi
2007-06-06 22:09   ` Olof Johansson
2007-06-06 22:07     ` Timur Tabi
2007-06-06 22:11       ` Arnd Bergmann
2007-06-06 22:19         ` Timur Tabi
2007-06-06 22:35           ` Arnd Bergmann
2007-06-06 22:38             ` Timur Tabi
2007-06-06 22:24       ` Olof Johansson
2007-06-06 22:32         ` Timur Tabi
2007-06-06 23:54           ` Olof Johansson
2007-06-07 14:23             ` Timur Tabi
2007-06-07 15:20               ` Olof Johansson [this message]
2007-06-07 15:20                 ` Timur Tabi
2007-06-07 15:36                   ` Olof Johansson
2007-06-06 22:48         ` Timur Tabi
2007-06-07  0:00           ` Olof Johansson
2007-06-07  2:55 ` Kim Phillips

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