From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <003101bff189$9ac1f800$084da8c0@uranus> From: "Heiko Jakob" To: "Neil Russell" , "David Riley" , , "Timothy A. Seufert" References: <39FB3C16.3359BC41@the-rileys.net><20001028172451.A10220@lx.c-side.com> Subject: Re: PPC byte ordering Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2000 15:59:43 +0200 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Sender: owner-linuxppc-dev@lists.linuxppc.org List-Id: > At 5:24 PM -0700 10/28/00, Neil Russell wrote: > > >It would in theory be possible to have the kernel run big-endian as it is > >and have certain user programs run little endian by setting the LE bit in > >the MSR register for the process in question. The real problem here is > >that you have to add a *lot* of code to system calls to make this work. > >There are a few system calls that this would be real difficult, such > >as ioctl(). I once looked into doing this for the MIPS with SVR4 UNIX. > > The other real problem is that Linus Torvalds has already said that > he will never ever in a million years accept a patch which attempts > to do such a thing, so you'd have to fork the kernel to do it. > According to Linus, architectures are either big or little-endian, > not both. A sane position considering the syscall ugliness you > mention How do the linux-mips people handle with big- and little-endian code ? Maybe they know a good solution, which allows both big- and little-endian code to execute. The PPC is big-endian by nature, and what for we do need little-endian code to be executed on a PPC ? MfG ** Sent via the linuxppc-dev mail list. See http://lists.linuxppc.org/