From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2000 13:18:11 +0100 (CET) From: Geert Uytterhoeven To: "Timothy A. Seufert" cc: Neil Russell , David Riley , linuxppc-dev@lists.linuxppc.org Subject: Re: PPC byte ordering In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linuxppc-dev@lists.linuxppc.org List-Id: On Mon, 30 Oct 2000, Timothy A. Seufert wrote: > 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... Really? Or did he mean: big-endian kernels must not run little-endian binaries and vice versa. Note that there exist 3 flavors of MIPS: 32-bit big-endian, 32-bit little-endian and 64-bit. Linux supports them all. Expect to upgrade the hard drives on your local Debian mirror soon :-) Gr{oetje,eeting}s, Geert -- Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that. -- Linus Torvalds ** Sent via the linuxppc-dev mail list. See http://lists.linuxppc.org/