> Has anyone attempted to get the PCI subsystem, the ncr driver
> and the if_de driver working on a BigEndian system.
> 
> I am in the midst of porting to a new platform and these
> drivers would be great if they could be unsed in a non LE system.
> 
> So far in the ncr driver I have identified several places
> that require byte swapping: the scripts, word writes to
> memory that the ncr chip reads. Scripts that are written on the fly...

Don't the SIOP chips have an endianness setting?  all (1 8-) of the
53c8xx boards i've seen has an endianness jumper, though it's not
clear that it would be a good idea to actually _use_ it...

A couple of people have suggested to me that there is some need for
'native to bus' and 'bus to native' endianness conversion macros...
This could very well be a good use for them.

There's also the minor detail that, in many people's opinion, the
current 53c8xx driver should be thown out wholesale.  however, last i
heard, nobody had made real progress on a replacement.


As you appear to already understand, writes done with bus_mem and
bus_io macros are 'safe' -- it's assumed that the code which
implements them will do the right thing, in terms of making sure the
values are written to the bus in the appropriate way.
Given that, i don't think it should be too hard to make the 'de'
driver work on a big-endian PCI system.

If you run into problems, i'd be glad to help you out with them.


cgd