Writing portable Linux driver with respect to processor endianness

In my previous post I discussed about the Endianness concept.

There are many points to take care while writing a portable linux driver.One of the key point I wanted to mention here is the usage of some portable API's which will take care of the automatic endianness conversion for ensuring a portable driver.

Many times during kernel programming we interact with hardware devices for exchanging bytes of data.It can be the case that we receive data from hardware, we pack them and copy to application buffer and vice-versa.

Suppose I consider the case where I read some chunks of data from hardware and I need to copy the data to application buffer.I do not know that if its a little endian or a big endian processor where my driver is running and I only know that my application wants data in big endian format.

So if my driver was running on a little endian processor and I directly copy data to application buffer then it wrong.

So I use a API provided by linux kernel: cpu_to_be32()

Now this API takes as argument a 32-bit data and returns me the big endian format 32-bit data and therefore now I am happy, not to care about the native endianness.

Please have a look at some more API's in the below link and enjoy writing a portable linux driver:

Please have a look for such API's in below link:
http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/include/linux/byteorder/generic.h