Messages in this thread | | | From | (H. Peter Anvin) | Subject | Re: endiannes of the kernel | Date | 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 -- "The user's computer downloads the ActiveX code and simulates a 'Blue Screen' crash, a generally benign event most users are familiar with and that would not necessarily arouse suspicions." -- Security exploit description on http://www.zks.net/p3/how.asp
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |