Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:32:15 -0500 From: Lowell Gilbert <freebsd-questions-local@be-well.ilk.org> To: Rob Farmer <rfarmer@predatorlabs.net> Cc: FreeBSD-Questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Endianness Message-ID: <447hrnlztc.fsf@be-well.ilk.org> In-Reply-To: <b025ceb71001121355u6cae7315h608b5f6fc4b811dc@mail.gmail.com> (Rob Farmer's message of "Tue, 12 Jan 2010 13:55:09 -0800") References: <b025ceb71001121251m77ae380fs129699f7bd2a896e@mail.gmail.com> <20100112210427.GB18673@Grumpy.DynDNS.org> <4B4CE9B1.4040508@netscape.net> <44hbqrm1w2.fsf@be-well.ilk.org> <b025ceb71001121355u6cae7315h608b5f6fc4b811dc@mail.gmail.com>
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Rob Farmer <rfarmer@predatorlabs.net> writes: > On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 1:47 PM, Lowell Gilbert > <freebsd-questions-local@be-well.ilk.org> wrote: >> As the original poster observed, PowerPC, Sparc and IA64 are all capable >> of being used in either endian setting. >> >> I checked endian.h, and it looks as though FreeBSD uses Sparc as >> big-endian, IA64 as little-endian, and PowerPC as whatever it picks up >> from gcc (probably big-endian, since the architecture does funny things >> with alignment in little-endian mode. >> >> My best advice, though, is to suggest that Mr. Farmer shouldn't assume >> that the application will work anywhere without actually trying it. > > Well, the upstream author states in the documentation that there are > endian problems and to use it only on little endian machines. I don't > have any hardware that is non-i386/amd64 and about a year ago when I > tried to cross build to powerpc in tinderbox it didn't work, so I > can't really do that. I didn't mean to imply that you need to check, just that it's likely to not work (regardless of endianness) and you should be aware of that. powerpc and sparc aren't "tier-1" architectures anyway, so ordinary users are unlikely to run into them, and there are probably lots of ports that won't run on them. The tinderbox doesn't even build for powerpc. -- Lowell Gilbert, embedded/networking software engineer, Boston area http://be-well.ilk.org/~lowell/
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