PowerPC in little endian mode
Most of the trouble I have on my PowerPC platform came from the fact
that
Linux work in big-endian mode, this break some drivers like last USB
developement,
and other PCI boards that work fine on i386 linux. Designing a
driver working on
different little-endian processors is quite easy the only
differences between these
systems is the PCI bus mapping that is different, but upgrading a
driver is quite easy.
Some applications are broken too, and from a user space point of
view, the only difference
between i386 and PowerPC linux is endianess.
PowerPC 603, 740, 750 don't have a true little endian support, but
some bridge like MPC106
seems to be able to translate munged data to true little-endian mode
between CPU and PCI bridge, this
is enough to have a working full little-endian system.
And so be able to get all the software from linux i386 working world
without headache.
Patrick LERDA
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