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Mainframe OSes including mainframe Linux are Big Endian. Maybe mainframe Linux could switch but thus far it has not, it seems unlikely the other mainframe OSes
by kev009 2y ago
Mainframe OSes including mainframe Linux are Big Endian. Maybe mainframe Linux could switch but thus far it has not, it seems unlikely the other mainframe OSes would want to. AIX is also Big Endian and seems unlikely to switch and will be supported until at least 2040.
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.
- userbinator 2y agoI 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.)
- tyingq 2y agoI think it's negligible, but you don't have to byte swap for network order with big endian.
- yencabulator 2y agoMeanwhile, bigendian numbers sort correctly with a byte-wise sort, great for on-disk data structures.
- rodgerd 2y agoAIX is big endian but: "SUSE's Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) offers SLES 12 on Power in little endian mode only. As such, customers will need to migrate from big to little endian as they upgrade from SLES 11 to SLES 12." - https://developer.ibm.com/articles/l-power-little-endian-faq-trs/ 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=fEve3JafZjSvbd5cy=MpW4u7zQ@mail.gmail.com/ https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wisMFiBHT7dLFOtHqX=fEve3J...
- tyingq 2y agoProbably also some remaining low-end wifi routers that are big endian. MIPS, etc.
- ajb 2y agoOh yeah. Given that MIPS supports both, I'd have thought most would be configured for little endian, but there are still currently supported MIPS big endian on openwrt.org
- kees99 2y agoIt's mostly down to what endianness was in use by stock firmware. Switching it, is a fair amount of pain, as you can no longer run binaries from stock under your new mipsel FW.