From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Gavin Scott" Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 00:52:13 +0000 Subject: [Linux-ia64] One little, two little, three little endian... Message-Id: List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-ia64@vger.kernel.org Hello list, I want a big endian version of Linux for IPF. Just how crazy am I? I'm working with a group of customers and software developers who are migrating away from HP's proprietary MPE/iX operating system on the HPe3000 systems that HP announced the discontinuance of one year ago today. Many of these people are already using HP-UX to some degree, and most are interested in the possibility of using Linux in the future. Of course both MPE/iX and HP-UX are big-endian environments, and many of the people I talk to would be very interested in having an endian-compatible Linux that would run on big (i.e. IA-64) HP servers. For this group, x86 compatibility is probably a non-issue. I'm interested in any comments that come to mind. I'm most interested in just how complex the task would be from a technical point of view, either to make the system buildable either way, or possibly supporting a per-process endian bit (which would be cool, but probably a lot more work). I'm reasonably familiar with the IA-64 architecture and know most of what there is to know about PA-RISC. Thanks, Gavin -- Gavin Scott Vice President Allegro Consultants, Inc. gavin@allegro.com