Re: [PATCH] 2.5.8 IDE 36

[Linus Torvalds]

On Tue, 16 Apr 2002, David Lang wrote:
> 
> It sounds as if you are removing this capability, am I misunderstaning you
> or is there some other way to do this? (and duplicating the drive to use
> dd to byteswap is not practical for 100G+)

Doing it with a loopback like interface at a higher level is the much 
saner operation - I understand why Martin removed the byteswap support, 
and agree with it 100%. It just didn't make any sense from a driver 
standpoint.

In fact, the byteswapping was actively incorrect, in that it swapped data 
in-place - which means that it corrupts the data area while IO is in 
progress. It also only works for PIO.

The only reason byteswapping exists is a rather historical one: Linux did 
the wrong thing for "insw/outsw" on big-endian architectures at one point 
(it byteswapped the data).

(Oh, and coupled with the fact that the IDE ID string is in a "big-endian"  
word order, which may have been one more reason to add a "do byteswapped 
IO" thing).

		Linus