From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Grant Grundler Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 03:41:28 +0000 Subject: Re: [Linux-ia64] One little, two little, three little endian... Message-Id: List-Id: References: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-ia64@vger.kernel.org Don Dugger wrote: > Data compatibility is the only real gotcha I can think of and that's just > a translation issue. Potentially creating the translation utilities will > be a problem but I predict it's a smaller problem than coming up with a > big endian IA64 Linux. Have you ever tried to import wrong-endian data? I thought people gave up trying to do that on 16-bit machines. I've been in more endian flip-flops than I care to remember. (Olivetti flip-flopped about every 2 years in the early 90s, talk about customer nightmares...) Data conversion has to be re-adressed by *every* application because of padding. I think the work mostly cannot be amortized over lots of customers. I agree with david. User space libs need to be migrated from the desired environment. See how far a per-process approach gets first. grant