On 01/21/2015 05:49 AM, Ralf Baechle wrote:
On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 10:22:30AM +0000, Markos Chandras wrote:
What would use this? Or in other words, why is this needed?
It was a patch I started including years ago in Gentoo's mips-sources, and just
never thought much about. I know it was submitted several times in the past,
but I can't recall what, if any objection was ever made. No harm in sending it
in again...
Clarification, submitted several times in the past by others. I think I sent
it in once prior, but never got review or feedback.
I believe this patch is mostly useful for cores that can boot in both LE
and BE so being able to tell the byteorder from cpuinfo can be helpful
at times. Having readelf and other tools in your userland may not always
be the case, but you surely have "cat" :)
So that patch looks good to me but i think the #ifdefs can be avoided.
Can we use
if (config_enabled(CONFIG_CPU_BIG_ENDIAN) {
} else {
}
stuff instead?
Exactly the code Joshua is submitting is what has been there until commit
874124ebb630 (Merge with Linux 2.4.15.) in 2001. One reason to remove it
was that I had a prototype of a kernel supporting the execution of
application of native and the other byte order working and the field in
/proc/cpuinfo was plain lying in that case. Not a terribly relevant
reason in retrospective but I'm wondering if just in case we should
rename the field to kernel_byteorder?
This is kind of my reason for questioning adding this thing in the first
place.
Any user of the data probably wouldn't be ready for the case you
mention. *And* the data is available from other sources.
Ralf
