Broadcom BCM94306

[Segher Boessenkool]

On 15-jan-04, at 1:13, linas at austin.ibm.com wrote:
> totally irrelevent and off-topic, but ... the ppc can (or used
> to be able to) switch endianess dynamically.  To be more correct,
> it can run some user-space code that was little endian, by having
> the kernel set the appropriate bit in the MSR before it ran the
> app.  I have no idea is the linux kernel saves/restores this bit(s),
> or if this is still supported on the newest processors.

It can also run supervisor-level code in little endian mode.

The 2.0 PEM still doesn't show this support as optional [look at the
ILE and LE bits in the MSR], but it does say that "the code sequence
used to switch from big to little-endian mode may differ among
processors".

Also note that the 970 does not support wrong^H^H^H^H^Hlittle-endian
mode
at all.

As these bits are in the MSR, and you are supposed to leave alone the
bits
that you don't explicitly touch, I suppose the Linux kernel
saves/restores
the bits just fine.  But I didn't check whether it actually does, so
YMMV.


Segher


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