On 25/04/2024 07:30, Manos Pitsidianakis wrote:
On Wed, 24 Apr 2024 at 13:31, Mark Cave-Ayland
<mark.cave-ayland@ilande.co.uk> wrote:
On 23/04/2024 12:05, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
On 23/4/24 11:18, Manos Pitsidianakis wrote:
On Tue, 23 Apr 2024 at 11:47, Manos Pitsidianakis
<manos.pitsidianakis@linaro.org> wrote:
On Tue, 23 Apr 2024 at 00:11, Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com> wrote:
On Mon, Apr 22, 2024 at 11:07:21PM +0200, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
On 22/4/24 23:02, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
On Mon, Apr 22, 2024 at 04:20:56PM +0200, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
Since VirtIO devices can change endianness at runtime,
we need to use the device endianness, not the target
one.
Cc: qemu-stable@nongnu.org
Fixes: eb9ad377bb ("virtio-sound: handle control messages and streams")
Signed-off-by: Philippe Mathieu-Daudé <philmd@linaro.org>
This is all completely bogus. Virtio SND is from Virtio 1.0 only.
It is unconditionally little endian.
This part of the code is for PCM frames (raw bytes), not virtio spec
fields (which indeed must be LE in modern VIRTIO).
Thought a little more about it. We should keep the target's endianness
here, if it's mutable then we should query the machine the device is
attached to somehow. the virtio device should never change endianness
like Michael says since it's not legacy.
Grr. So as Richard suggested, this need to be pass as a device
property then.
(https://lore.kernel.org/qemu-devel/ed134c9d-6e6f-465b-900f-e39ca4e09876@linaro.org/)
It feels to me that the endianness is something that should be negotiated as
part of
the frame format, since the endianness of the audio hardware can be different
from
that of the CPU (think PReP machines where it was common that a big endian CPU
is
driving little endian hardware as found on x86).
But that is the job of the hardware drivers, isn't it? Here we are
taking frames passed from the guest to its virtio driver in the format
specified in the target cpu's endianness and QEMU as the device passes
it to host ALSA/Pipewire/etc which in turn passes it to the actual
audio hardware driver..
The problem is that the notion of target CPU endian is not fixed. For example
the
PowerPC CPU starts off in big-endian mode, but these days most systems will
switch
the CPU to little-endian mode on startup to run ppc64le. There's also the ILE
bit
which can be configured so that a big-endian PowerPC CPU can dynamically switch
to
little-endian mode when processing an interrupt, so you could potentially end
up with
either depending upon the current mode of the CPU.
These are the kinds of issues that led to the later virtio specifications simply
using little-endian for everything, since then there is zero ambiguity over what
endian is required for the virtio configuration space accesses.
It feels to me that assuming a target CPU endian is fixed for the PCM frame
formats
is simply repeating the mistakes of the past - and even the fact that we are
discussing this within this thread suggests that at a very minimum the
virtio-snd
specification needs to be updated to clarify the byte ordering of the PCM frame
formats.
ATB,
Mark.