Re: Cobalt Qube
On Wed, Dec 02, 1998 at 04:17:45PM +0100, Sven LUTHER wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 02, 1998 at 10:11:15AM -0500, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 02, 1998 at 04:01:23PM +0100, Sven LUTHER wrote:
> > > The Powerpc can do that also, but i think a particular endianness is chosen
> > > either in the hardware (hardwired, or hardware switch) or by the OS. in the
> > > powerpc it is possible to change endiannes my changing a value in the control
> > > register, but i don't think anyone has yet taken advantage of it, for example
> > > to use little endian only drivers in a big endian setting.
> >
> > As I understand it, the processor will gladly operate in another
> > endianness - but your firmware may object strenuously. There's really
> > no adequate way I can see to take advantage of this, except for
> > bragging points.
>
> what firmware ? what has it to do with it ? it could possibly work on non mac
> hardware then ? I thought the main point was that it would probably confuse a
> lot of things, and that in the long end it would probably be easier to rewrite
> the driver to be endianess aware than to play with the endianness issue ?
Every machine has some sort of boot firmware. This is (am I out on a
limb here?) probably not endian-independant! So if you switch the
processor's endianness, it may simply fail to boot. And yes, fixing
drivers is MUCH easier.
Dan
Reply to: