On 10/01/2009 04:54 AM, Krzysztof Halasa wrote:
"Richard W.M. Jones"rjones@redhat.com writes:
Is ARM big endian?
It can be either. Intel's IXP4xx networking chips are usually running BE since their internal network engines are BE-only and it's thus more efficient.
The IXP4xx networking engine operates big endian only. Nevertheless many NSLU2 machines run little-endian and still use that networking hardware. Current and future Debian releases for ARM (which is a top-tier architecture on Debian) are little-endian only. 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.