Re: readl() / writel() on PowerPC

[Paul Mackerras]

David T Eger writes:

> Am I missing something?  Is there some reason that readl() and
> writel() should byte-swap by default?

readl()/writel() are defined to access PCI memory space in units of 32
bits.  PCI is by definition little-endian, PowerPC is (natively at
least) big-endian, hence the byte-swap.  Same for inl/outl etc., but
not insl/outsl - they don't swap because they are typically used for
transferring arrays of bytes, just doing it 4 bytes at a time (2 at a
time for insw/outsw).

You can use __raw_readl/__raw_writel if you don't want byte-swapping,
but they also don't give you any barriers.  Thus if you do

	__raw_writel(v, addr);
	x = __raw_readl(addr);

it is quite possible for the read to hit the device before the write.
If you want to prevent that you need to put an iobarrier_rw() call in
between the read and the write.  You don't need a barrier between
successive writes unless you want to prevent any potential
store-gathering from happening, because PowerPC's don't reorder writes
to I/O regions.

Paul.