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Fun fact: Windows NT runs the PowerPC in little-endian mode: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180806-00/?p=99425 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/old

• atdrummond 4y ago
  Yes, and as Spijdar notes below, so does the single point release of Solaris for PPC that come out in this era.
• spijdar 4y ago
  So did Solaris! ... For some bizarre reason. I would love to hear an explanation for that, given SPARC is big endian only. I guess it was based on the x86 port? My fun fact is all PowerPC processors except the 970 "G5" CPU can do little endian! And the Linux kernel is actually capable of running LE processes on a BE kernel [1]. There was a bug for a long time in Linux where the kernel signal handler assumed all 32 bit processes are BE, but after patching that, 32 bit "ppcle" executables work. [1] Well, you can load mismatched endian processes, but syscalls and ioctls need data in the kernel endianness, so you would need a very weird libc and userland to actually use this