Re: Endianess question
On 2007-05-05 09:46 +0200, Wolf-Rüdiger Jürgens wrote:
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> I see that the Debian NSLU2 is little-endian but many other Arm boards
> using Big-endian. (Arcom, Snapgear ...).
It's more complicated than that. Some CPUs/boards can run big or little
endian - switched in either software or hardware. The NSLU2 runs
big-endian as supplied, and there is unoffical debian big-endian
support for it. Most hardware runs little-endian except for some
network appliance stuff which tends to be big-endian.
> What is the reason for using Little/Big Endian?
The main thing in favour of big-endian is that it matches ethernet
packet ordering so running hte whole system the same way saves a lot
of endian-swapping.
It's still reasonable to consider little-endian as 'standard' for arm,
although this is less true than it was a few years back.
Wookey
--
Principal hats: Balloonz - Toby Churchill - Aleph One - Debian
http://wookware.org/
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