Re: [Linux-ia64] One little, two little, three little endian...

Rich Altmaier
2002-11-15T17:44:09Z

FYI,
the Intel Fortran compiler runtime
has features for endianness conversion.
See the environment variable F_UFMTENDIAN.
See Intel Fortran Compiler Users's Guide, Customizing Compilation Environment,
Environment Variables, Little-endian to Big-endian Conversion.

Of course ISVs today have faced the endianness problem for many years.
So most aps have already designed in features for data conversion.
You should push back very hard as to exactly what application really
has a problem here. Clearly Fortran formatted data is not an issue, for e.g.
It would be pretty surprising if data generated for enterprise applications
were not already routinely interchanging with the little endian Windows environment.

To create an entirely new ABI is not a small deal.

Hopefully this is helpful,
Rich Altmaier, SGI

>
> On Thu, Nov 14, 2002 at 04:52:13PM -0800, Gavin Scott wrote:
> > 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
> >
> >