Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 30 Jul 1999 01:37:18 +0200 | From | Ralf Baechle <> | Subject | Re: endiannes of the kernel |
| |
On Thu, Jul 29, 1999 at 09:59:33AM +0200, Patrick Lerda wrote:
> Linux has been written on a little endian architecture: intel. In > little-endian mode > linux is well tested, the kernel works perfectly. If you chose > big-endian mode, linux > is still operational, but some parts of the kernel will be broken. > Drivers, filesystems etc... > must be written in a big-endian compatible way, all 16bits, 32bits > access to > hardware or to external data structures must be converted using some > macros > defined in the linux kernel. A lot of drivers were written specifically > for intel and are not big-endian > compatible... > So linux is more reliable in little endian.
Wrong. Linux/MIPS is running on both little and big endian platforms and it's equally reliable. In a few cases endianess fixes have been necessary but in the large picture of things endianess is a neglegtible issue. Having said that, some of the embedded people have choosen a specific endianess for their platforms because it saves them a significant amount of CPU. Nothing that couldn't be solved in hardware ...
Ralf
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |