Subject: Re: FW: Submission for S2io 10GbE driver

From: Grant Grundler <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2004 14:34:13 -0800

On Thu, Feb 05, 2004 at 02:09:09PM -0800, Leonid Grossman wrote:
> It looks like for the swapper issue we can get rid of PPC64-specific
> code, but not necessarily of big-endian-specific code.

right

> The behavior you describe is generic for Linux but not for the platform
> - on the same box, another OS will not byteswap, for example on the same
> pSeries box AIX will not byteswap while Linux will.

While I understand the desire to share the same driver across OSs,
providing "glue" code like sym53c8xx_2 drivers does can be very ugly.
You might look at that driver a bit and try to compare 2.4 vs 2.6.

> So, our ASIC is designed in a way that for a big endian machine the
> swapper control need not be touched, and for little endian box both
> register and DMA accesses have to be configured to swap - it would be
> nice to have the same configuration working on all systems, but this did
> not seem possible.

It's probably not. It sounds like the Tigon2 driver (acenic) which has
similar HW support. You see how endianess is handled there.

...
> Another small difference will be that the ASIC has actually slightly
> different statistic counters for  big and little endian.
> We can move these (very few) big/little definition into a header file so
> the source itself is clean, but I don't see a way to completely get rid
> of these... 

that's ok I think.

cheers,
grant