From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Mime-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <20001028172451.A10220@lx.c-side.com> References: <39FB3C16.3359BC41@the-rileys.net> <20001028172451.A10220@lx.c-side.com> Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2000 01:12:14 -0800 To: Neil Russell , David Riley , linuxppc-dev@lists.linuxppc.org From: "Timothy A. Seufert" Subject: Re: PPC byte ordering Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" 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... Tim Seufert ** Sent via the linuxppc-dev mail list. See http://lists.linuxppc.org/