Re: Powerpc (mac-G4) -essentially broken

[<benh@kernel.crashing.org>]

>I'm not arguing, and I can see that this is a very valid point of view 
>(kernel as a hardware abstraction layer, supporting only the facilities 
>the hardware does, and thus avoiding bloating with creaping featureism). 
> But the alternative view would  be that the kernel's sound interface is 
>there to play sound, regardless of byte order, and as we all know most 
>of the world has got ints the wrong way around, so it would be splendid 
>if the kernel could sort things out for us.  Obviously this isn't going 
>to fix the problem of asking for native sending the opposite or vice 
>versa, but how difficult is it just to byte-reverse things?

It's a lot easier to do in userland ;) The sound is DMA'ed directly
to the sound chip, the kernel don't touch the samples, at least not
in 16 bits mode.

>I'm saying this because my next job will have to be building libarts 
>from source and then trying to fix it.  I would rather make a smaller 
>change to the kernel module to provide both endianess, but it seems you 
>don't like that.

Neither do Linus ;)

Ben.