Re: [PATCH 0/3] New firewire stack

From: Kristian HÃgsberg
Date: Tue Dec 05 2006 - 11:47:33 EST


David Miller wrote:
From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 05 Dec 2006 16:42:42 +1100

- It's horribly broken in at least two area :

DO NOT USE BITFIELDS FOR DATA ON THE WIRE !!!

and

Where do you handle endianness ? (no need to shout for
that one).

(Or in general, do not use bitfields period ....)

Yes, this is a show stopper, the endianness and
word-size/endian testing should have been done before
submission.

I guess my mistake here was to present it as a patch submission. I acknowledged in my cover letter that it wasn't feature complete and I'm not pushing for inclusion just yet. I'm very much aware of the point that when replacing a subsystem like this, the new code has to be as good as the old code. In that respect, the patches I posted are lacking in other areas (isochronous streaming is the big one) that will take more work to fix than just making it work on big-endian and 64-bit architectures. It's still a work in progress.

Having said that, I've been working on this for a while now, and I wanted to announce the effort and open the discussion about replacing the old stack. Something about "release early, release often"... :) Anyway, I've moved the portability issues to the top of my list now.

Kristian

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