PPC byte ordering

[Timothy A. Seufert]

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

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