Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1998 13:59:04 -0600 From: Warner Losh <imp@village.org> To: Roger Hardiman <roger@cs.strath.ac.uk> Cc: freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD Alpha. Which endian? Message-ID: <199808271959.NAA00801@harmony.village.org> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 27 Aug 1998 17:51:15 BST." <35E58E83.446B@cs.strath.ac.uk> References: <35E58E83.446B@cs.strath.ac.uk> <Pine.BSF.4.01.9808270943230.17263-100000@herring.nlsystems.com>
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In message <35E58E83.446B@cs.strath.ac.uk> Roger Hardiman writes: : I remember that when the Alpha cpu was designed one of the features : was the ability to switched to be big-endian or little-endian format : for a particular operating system. No. AFAIK, the alpha has never supported this. The only processor family on the planet that did this was the MIPS family, and some of its successors. Some of them even did this at run time (rather than at board design time[**]), but no operating system seems to have successfully taken advantage of this[*]. Warner [*] Ultrix is rumored to be able to run other endian MIPS code so they could run the mips compiler binaries on the Decstations that had the R4xxx CPU in it, but I've never been able to actually confirm this. [**] The MIPS Magnum R4000 based PCs are the only machine that I know of that can change its endianess after it has left the factory. You boot a special disk, and it scribbles bits into the ROMs uses to initialize the R4000 at boot.... To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message
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