Re: endiannes of the kernel
H. Peter Anvin (hpa@transmeta.com)
29 Jul 1999 08:28:52 GMT
Followup to: <3AC9A1611DF4D211AA8E00105AA56D8A048A86@IIS000.microdata.fr>
By author: Patrick Lerda <LERDA@microprocess.com>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> Linux has been written on a little endian architecture: intel. In
> little-endian mode linux is well tested, the kernel works
> perfectly. If you chose big-endian mode, linux is still operational,
> but some parts of the kernel will be broken. Drivers, filesystems
> etc... must be written in a big-endian compatible way, all 16bits,
> 32bits access to hardware or to external data structures must be
> converted using some macros defined in the linux kernel. A lot of
> drivers were written specifically for intel and are not big-endian
> compatible... So linux is more reliable in little endian.
>
I think that that is a truth with some major modification. Linux has
been running just fine on bigendian architectures (m68k, mipseb,
sparc) for quite a while without problems. Yes, if you're the first
to use a specific driver on a new arch you might have some minor
problems, but that's not limited to endianness.
So Linux will work just fine on either endianness.
-hpa
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