Subject: Re: PPC byte ordering

From: "Heiko Jakob" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2000 15:59:43 +0200

> 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/