linux-kernel - Re: Introduce support for little endian PowerPC

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Message-ID: <4CA5D61F.8000102@mlbassoc.com>
Date:	Fri, 01 Oct 2010 06:37:51 -0600
From:	Gary Thomas <gary@...assoc.com>
To:	Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@...nel.crashing.org>
CC:	Josh Boyer <jwboyer@...il.com>, linuxppc-dev@...ts.ozlabs.org,
	paulus@...ba.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	Ian Munsie <imunsie@....ibm.com>
Subject: Re: Introduce support for little endian PowerPC

On 10/01/2010 06:15 AM, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-10-01 at 05:55 -0600, Gary Thomas wrote:
>> On 10/01/2010 05:30 AM, Josh Boyer wrote:
>>> On Fri, Oct 1, 2010 at 5:02 AM, Kumar Gala<galak@...nel.crashing.org>   wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Oct 1, 2010, at 2:05 AM, Ian Munsie wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Some PowerPC processors can be run in either big or little endian modes, some
>>>>> others can map selected pages of memory as little endian, which allows the same
>>>>> thing. Until now we have only supported the default big endian mode in Linux.
>>>>> This patch set introduces little endian support for the 44x family of PowerPC
>>>>> processors.
>>>>
>>>>    From a community aspect is anyone actually going to use this?  Is this going to be the equivalent of voyager on x86?  I've got nothing against some of the endian clean ups this introduces.  However the changes to misc_32.S are a bit ugly from a readability point of view.  Just seems like this is likely to bit-rot pretty quickly.
>>>
>>> I'm with Kumar on this one.  Why would we want to support this?  I
>>> can't say I would be very willing to help anyone run in LE mode, let
>>> alone have it randomly selectable.
>>
>> Indeed, I thought we had killed that Windows-NT dog ~15 years ago :-)
>
> Actually this has more to do with having to deal with code written for
> ARM LE :-)

The comment was mostly aimed as a remnder of the main reason this was considered
a long time ago.

I understand that the world has moved on, and sadly the vast majority
of hardware is now little endian (although it still baffles me why anyone
would think that way...)

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
Gary Thomas                 |  Consulting for the
MLB Associates              |    Embedded world
------------------------------------------------------------
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