From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Don Dugger Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 03:50:36 +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 Two points: 1) I didn't say data conversion was easy just that the one time effort of converting would be easier in the long run than the on-going effort of creating and maintaining, for ever, big endian user libraries. 2) I thought PA-RISC was a 32-bit processor which means porting to IA64, assuming you're porting to 64-bit addressing (and if not why are you porting to IA64 in the first place), will entail data incompatibilities independent of endian-ness so you still have to do the data conversion. It comes down to engineering trade offs and I still say that the one time port will be easier in the long run. On Thu, Nov 14, 2002 at 07:41:28PM -0800, Grant Grundler wrote: > 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 > > _______________________________________________ > Linux-IA64 mailing list > Linux-IA64@linuxia64.org > http://lists.linuxia64.org/lists/listinfo/linux-ia64 -- Don Dugger "Censeo Toto nos in Kansa esse decisse." - D. Gale n0ano@n0ano.com