"...when the developer does not have access to, say, a big-endian system to test with."
Currently, the most accessible big-endian platform that I know of is the Raspberry Pi running NetBSD.
Currently, the most accessible big-endian platform that I know of is the Raspberry Pi running NetBSD.
Big-endian seems to be something of Thomasson[1] these days. I wonder if there is any real use case apart from testing code to see if it still runs on old machines.
Personally, I find big endian a lot more natural when doing hardware development. I understand there are people who think the opposite. As far as performance it is negligible.. network order is Big, PCIe is little so you are usually eating some conversion on either platform.
I also really don't understand why people thought it was such a hard concept as to largely force Linux (PPC, arm, mips) toward little.
Working with arbitrary-precision arithmetic makes you realise how logical little-endian is (and how weird they appear on a big-endian machine.)
- https://developer.ibm.com/articles/l-power-little-endian-faq...
> I also really don't understand why people thought it was such a hard concept as to largely force Linux (PPC, arm, mips) toward little.
My memory is that it's largely Linus having strong opinions.
Ah, yes: "Let's just try to kill big-endian data, it's disgusting and should just die already." https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wisMFiBHT7dLFOtHqX=fEve3J...
Switching it, is a fair amount of pain, as you can no longer run binaries from stock under your new mipsel FW.
FreeBSD is not Linux (obviously) so this is making a command named something-linux to boot FreeBSD? seems humiliating somehow
bootoctlinux is the command Cavium added to U-boot to boot an ELF kernel. You can alias it as something else if it makes you feel proud.