Endianness

[Lowell Gilbert]

Rob Farmer <rfarmer at predatorlabs.net> writes:

> On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 1:47 PM, Lowell Gilbert
> <freebsd-questions-local at 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/