linux-kernel - Re: Introduce support for little endian PowerPC

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Message-ID: <1285950041.15020.272.camel@thor.local>
Date:	Fri, 01 Oct 2010 18:20:41 +0200
From:	Michel Dänzer <michel@...nzer.net>
To:	Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@...nel.crashing.org>
Cc:	Josh Boyer <jwboyer@...il.com>, linuxppc-dev@...ts.ozlabs.org,
	paulus@...ba.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	Ian Munsie <imunsie@....ibm.com>
Subject: Re: Introduce support for little endian PowerPC

On Fre, 2010-10-01 at 22:14 +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote: 
> 
> Now, the main reasons in practice are anything touching graphics.
> 
> There's quite a few IP cores out there for SoCs that don't have HW
> swappers, and -tons- of more or less ugly code that can't deal with non
> native pixel ordering (hell, even Xorg isn't good at it, we really only
> support cards that have HW swappers today).

That's not true. Even the radeon driver doesn't really need the HW
swappers anymore with KMS.


> There's an even bigger pile of application code that deals with graphics
> without any regard for endianness and is essentially unfixable.

Out of curiosity, what kind of APIs are those apps using? X11 and OpenGL
have well-defined semantics wrt endianness, allowing the drivers to
handle any necessary byte swapping internally, and IME the vast majority
of apps handle this correctly.


-- 
Earthling Michel Dänzer           |                http://www.vmware.com
Libre software enthusiast         |          Debian, X and DRI developer
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