Port-macppc archive

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index][Old Index]

Re: Change endianess on G4?



> On the other hand, it's very clear that the "native" byte ordering of
> the ppc family is big-endian, and lots of operations take a
> performance hit in little-endian mode.

Never mind performance hit; it doesn't even work rationally.  It's been
a while since I read up on ppc little-endian mode, but as I recall: I
suspect someone tried to design a little-endian mode that allowed
sharing memory between endiannesses without needing to byteswap data,
which is not a coherent desire.  They came impressively close, but,
since it's not a self-consistent thing to do, the result is somewhat
broken.

I'm not sure about all of that - as I say, it's been a while - but I'm
sure it didn't work sanely, and not very much like a truly
little-endian machine.

/~\ The ASCII                             Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML                mouse%rodents-montreal.org@localhost
/ \ Email!           7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B


Home | Main Index | Thread Index | Old Index