On Tuesday 14 January 2014 03:56 PM, Nishanth Menon wrote:
On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 2:20 PM, Victor Kamensky victor.kamensky@linaro.org wrote:
On 14 January 2014 09:56, Nishanth Menon nm@ti.com wrote:
On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 11:35 AM, Victor Kamensky victor.kamensky@linaro.org wrote:
When BE kernel is built Makefile does take of compiling code in BE mode. I.e all proper flags like -mbig-endian and -Wl,--be8 will be set.
Agreed, and I assume you cannot instead switch to LE mode when entering assembly assuming LE?
Yes. Note that this asm interacts with other data in kernel that would be in BE form. And after all linker will not allow to put together files that were compiled in different endianity.
The reason I ask this is - most of our development is NOT in BE mode. we will continue to manipulate and add assembly - AM335x, DRA7/OMAP5 etc.. and obviously not every code change will indulge in ensuring right markers will be in place.
by ensuring readl_relaxed handles the variations, you have ensured that I dont need to care about drivers other than to ensure they use _relaxed variants. in the case of assembly, this does not seem long term manageable.
Yes, I agree if it is outside of main use case it will get broken if not attended to. Definitely universe entropy increases :) - if left without attention things will decay. Note we admit that even with ARM CPU core BE changes similar decay can happen eventually ...that is what LNG BE group trying to prevent. I think the deal here is that next user of it can/need to fix things if they decayed.
Personally, I have no idea what "LNG BE" stands for.. I see the approach we are attempting here is to do any interaction external to ARM boundary to go through the ARM_BE8 macro.
If we want to make this something we can live with, then the platforms will have to ensure memory operations external to ARM must be operated upon by these macros. Instead, an approach that may be used is to introduce accessors macros that will provide right instruction based on BE/LE build and BE/LE SoC peripheral behavior.
is the idea of BE build meant to deal with having a single BE kernel build work for all platforms (including LE ones)?
Sort of. The idea here to run BE image on OMAP4 chip, with kernel that would deals with LE periphery correctly, but ARM core run in BE with special kernel that compiled for BE case (i.e CONFIG_CPU_BIG_ENDIAN is set).
I still dont get the usecase - other than "hey, we do this coz we can do it!".. I mean, yep, it sounds great and all.. but 4 years down the line, is this still going to work? is this going to be interesting careabout? or we are just maintaining additional code for a passing fancy or proof-of-concept?
Valid concern. From LNG BE group point of view it is not "we can do it". It is more like we've done it. We have Pandaboard ES running BE kernel for a while. It is in LNG BE tree. We used it as development and testing vehicle for BE work for a while. We are very grateful to the platform for that - it is affordable and easily available! Given, beyond ongoing BE testing on Pandaboard in LNG there may not be valid use case for further things on OMAP4 BE. We had discussion with Santosh Shilimkar from TI during last Linaro connect what to do with LNG BE Pandaboard series. Santosh suggested and we agreed that we would try to contribute them back to community. And that is what Taras is doing. IMHO even though there may not be real
ok.. some sort of Linaro thing about which I have no background about
- but dont really care in this context.
Nothing related Linaro. Its just that platforms are supporting ARM BE mode and Linaro folks had working patches for Panda. So I suggested to get them on the lists.
Regards, Santosh