Re: [Qemu-devel] [PULL V3 00/20] Net patches

[Peter Maydell]

On 26 May 2016 at 16:20, Eric Blake <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 05/26/2016 09:08 AM, Peter Maydell wrote:
>>
>> Apologies for the lack of any backtraces in the output, but
>> this is almost certainly the result of trying to do le64_to_cpu()
>> or cpu_to_le64() on a buffer which isn't necessarily aligned
>> (usually some pointer into guest memory). Use the functions
>> ldq_le_p() and stq_le_p() instead, which will handle a
>> potentially misaligned pointer for you. (There are similar
>> functions for other access widths too.)
>
> Since these functions are constructed by ## token pasting, it's very
> hard to grep .h files to see what variations-on-a-theme are actually
> available, nor is the documentation clear on what they all do (in-place
> vs. copy, pass a value vs. a pointer, ...).  It might be a nice
> bite-sized task to beef up the documentation and at least call out ALL
> of the endian-conversion functions in a nice comment (to make it
> greppable), along with this tidbit of information on which forms are
> optimized but require alignment, vs. work anywhere but potentially slower.

The documentation of the ld* functions is in bswap.h (the
comment starting "the generic syntax is"), though I agree
it is a bit awkward not having it greppable. There would
probably be about 200 functions if you expanded out the names
just in the ld*_p() family.

We could probably also do a better job of marking which of
these function families are recommended, and which are
obsolete flavours which we have because a bunch of old code
still uses them.

(You can tell cpu_to_le64() and friends don't handle misalignment
because they take a uint64_t, not a pointer to one.)

thanks
-- PMM