insw/outsw/insl/outsl (was: Re: your mail)

[Geert Uytterhoeven]

On Thu, 17 Feb 2000, Paul Mackerras wrote:
> Does anyone have any objection if I make insw/outsw/insl/outsl *not*
> byte-swap the data?  The reason is that these functions are mostly used
> for transferring blocks of data, i.e. arrays of bytes.  I haven't found a
> single instance where they are used for transferring arrays of 16 or
> 32-bit words.
>
> This would mean that we wouldn't need the kludge in the ide stuff where we
> redefine insw as ide_insw (which doesn't byte-swap).  There is currently a
> bug there because insl does still byte-swap, which means that if you set
> the -c1 flag with hdparm, you get byte-swapped data. :-(

Hmm... This is indeed ambiguous. Is e.g. insl() used to (a) read n 32-bit words
from (little endian) ISA I/O space, or (b) used to read n*4 bytes from ISA I/O
space, using 32-bit accesses?

What about moving this to linux-kernel? It affects all big endian platforms.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

						Geert

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Geert Uytterhoeven ------------- Sony Software Development Center Europe (SDCE)
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