John Reiser jreiser@bitwagon.com writes:
The IXP4xx networking engine operates big endian only. Nevertheless many NSLU2 machines run little-endian and still use that networking hardware.
With a performance penalty since all buffers have to be swapped.
Little- endian operation of the CPU offers the advantage that an unaligned fetch from memory gives results that are usable after quick fixup. An unaligned fetch in big-endian mode essentially gives junk.
Both BE and LE obviously have advantages and disadvantages.