Re: BCM5809S support in bnx(4) and brgphy(4)

[Eduardo Horvath <eeh%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Thu, 2 Dec 2010, Izumi Tsutsui wrote:

> > What swap is done by what hardware?
> 
> Some bus masters like bnx(4) and epic(4) treat host's memory
> as BE if it's configured so. No byteswap against DMA descripters
> is necessary in the driver in such case.
> 
> Using two uint16_t members against a uint32_t descripter requires
> extra ifdefs to switch BE and LE environments as bitfield in structure.

Ah, I see.  Adding byte swapping to the DMA engine never works right.  HW 
engineers are wacky.

> 
> > Sigh.  I really need to get off my butt and add a bunch of bus_dma 
> > accessors (like the bus_space ones but for DMA buffers) to solve this 
> > problem optimally across all architectures.
> 
> I guess you are thinking about extra support for bus controller
> that supports byteswap ops, not individual bus masters.

Actually, things get a lot more complicated than that based on the 
hardware in question.  Byte swapping can happen in lots of different 
places:

1 In registers (using things like the bswap instruction in x86)

2 In load/store instructions (PowerPC special LE load/store instructions)

3 In the MMU (UltraSPARCs can have a bit set in the PTE to swap the 
endianness of a page)

4 Bus controllers (haven't seen this one yet, but I'm sure you can do it)

5 The DMA engine (as above)

6 The device itself (This differs from #5 in that the device can issue 
sub-word accesses with the correct endiannes)

When DMA memory is allocated or a DMA mapping is set up a negotiation must 
be done between the different layers to determine what the most efficient 
way to configure the system for a specific device.  

And don't forget the cache sync issues involved in accessing DMA memory.  
We're currently using an axe where a scalpel is probably more appropriate.

Eduardo