[U-Boot] [PATCH v3 02/10] armv7: add miscellaneous utility macros

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear Aneesh V,

In message <4DEDE8D9.7030306 at ti.com> you wrote:
>
> As I had mentioned in a previous mail, please note that the above
> macros are not for the same use-case as clrsetbits*() or friends (I had
> one macro that did something similar to clrsetbits*() and I intent to
> remove that in the next revision)
> 
> The above macros are for bit-field manipulation in a C integer variable
> - nothing more.

Why cannot we use the existing macros?

> So, if I have to write 5 different fields in a register I first write
> them into a variable and finally call writel() instead of making 5
> clrsetbits*() calls.

It does not make much difference to me if you call one macro or
another 5 times.

It does mater to me to have several incompatible implementations doing
essentially the same thing.

> There aren't any standard routines available for this need in
> Linux or U-Boot. I think you had agreed on this fact sometime back.

I agree in so far as I am not aware of any such macros in Linux
either.  But my conclusion is a different one - it boils down to:
Linux is way more complex than U-Boot, so if they don;t need this, we
don't need it either.


> No. It was not about code quality. The question was whether these
> macros were generic enough to be used as the standard U-boot ones. The
> key question is how do you represent bit fields. There are different
> alternatives for this.
> 
> a. bit range (say 5:3)
> b. shift(3) and field width(3)
> c. shift(3) and mask(0x38)

d) Value and mask

> We traditionally use (c) and we have auto-generated defines in this form.
> So, my macros use this format. I was not sure if other SoCs follow the
> same approach. That's why I suggested making them OMAP specific if you
> think (c) is not the standard approach.

Actually it does not matter.  See my previous message to Simon: you
can cover all this with the existing macros, and without adding any
significant overhead.

So far, I did not see a single good argument why any new, nonstandard
macros would be needed.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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