> The obvious (and very painful) answer is "compile time option".
>
> It'd mean having two IA-64 "ports", and it'd make people with binary
> distributions curse but is there any better solution ?
>
> Basically we have a processor that can be either big or little endian,
> should we treat it as two separate targets ?
You can deal with all that in one single port. See the MIPS port which is
running on a wide number of big and little endian targets. The effective
number of places where this needs to be considered is quite small.
User applications are somewhat worse because there is alot of code which
does not differenciate between the processor architecture and the
architecture of a machine around it, therefore make wrong conclusions like
``It's a MIPS, therefore it's big endian'' - just because RISC/os, IRIX,
SINIX etc. are big endian.
> Q: Is the IA-64 fixed endian on boot, or can it change "endianess" at
> runtime ?
Those who know have signed NDAs ...
Ralf
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/