RFC on writel and writel_relaxed

[Oliver]

On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 2:07 PM, Sinan Kaya <okaya at codeaurora.org> wrote:
> Hi PPC Maintainers,
>
> We are seeking feedback on the status of relaxed write API implementation.
> What is the motivation for not implementing the relaxed API?

Hmm, good question.

Looks like we've implemented the relaxed_* variants by aliasing them
to the normal version since the dawn of time. There's a comment in
io.h saying something about us not having the expected semantics for
the relaxed variants, but I don't see what the issue is... Ben?

> I see that network drivers are working around the issue by calling
> __raw_write() API directly but this also breaks other architectures
> like SPARC since the semantics of __raw_writel() seems to be system dependent.

Yeah that's pretty gross. Which drivers are doing this?

> This is putting drivers into a tight position and they cannot achieve true
> multi-arch enablement and are forced into calling __raw APIs flavors
> directly with #ifdef BIG_ENDIAN ugliness.
>
> Sinan
>
> --
> Sinan Kaya
> Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies, Inc. as an affiliate of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.
> Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. is a member of the Code Aurora Forum, a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.