On Friday 27 April 2012 06:42:55 Will Deacon wrote:
> The {read,write}s{b,w,l} functions are not defined across all
> architectures and therefore shouldn't be used by portable drivers. We
> should encourage driver writers to use the io{read,write}{8,16,32}_rep
> functions instead.

well, that isn't true today as a grep of the drivers/ tree shows.  perhaps we 
should fix that first ?  quite a number of architectures do implement these.

> This patch removes the {read,write} string functions for the generic IO
> header as they have no place in a new architecture port.

i don't see any file anywhere that describes what the baseline API is supposed 
to be, and what each set of funcs are for.  there is just the random ugliness 
in each arch's asm/io.h cobbled together until things work.  i think that also 
needs to be addressed before we go extending/contracting the API provides by 
asm-generic/io.h.
-mike