Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 00:46:39 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: imp@village.org (Warner Losh) Cc: roger@cs.strath.ac.uk, freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD Alpha. Which endian? Message-ID: <199808280046.RAA03720@usr07.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <199808271959.NAA00801@harmony.village.org> from "Warner Losh" at Aug 27, 98 01:59:04 pm
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> : 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[*]. The PPC can do this at runtime. The AIX and MACOS implementations use the PPC in Motorolla byte order, and the NT implemetnation uses it in the wrong byte order (wrong because the chip is not as efficient at some operations, or at least the 603 family of chips wasn't). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message
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