Re: __LITTLE_ENDIAN vs. __LITTLE_ENDIAN_BITFIELD

From: Krzysztof Halasa
Date: Tue Oct 09 2007 - 14:50:46 EST


Timur Tabi <timur@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> Yeah, I read that article some time ago when trying to diagnose the
> problem I was seeing. It does explain the point I'm trying to make.
> We have a device that's used on two product lines: one ARM-based, and
> one PowerPC. The ARM is little-endian, and the PowerPC is big-endian.
> The device can support little-endian or big-endian data, as long as
> the bit-order matches the byte-order.

There is no such thing as bit-order. The data lines are numbered,
say, D0 - D31, with D0 being LSB (bit) and D31 MSB.

You usually write register bits from MSB to LSB, so shift left
increments and shift right decrements the value. This is orthogonal
to the big/little-endianness.

Now your device can be connected straight to the bus or the data
lanes (4 on 32-bit PCI) can be crossed. This is platform-dependent.
The kernel provides functions/macros to access devices in
a independent way, such as writel/readl/pci_map_* etc.
--
Krzysztof Halasa
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