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by classichasclass 1868 days ago
Power ISA systems are still bi-endian and many systems run big. In fact, the low level OPAL interfaces require you to be in big-endian mode, AIX and i are still BE, and both FreeBSD and OpenBSD have BE flavours for current PowerNV systems. Even a few Linux distros run big (Adelie comes to mind). They're definitely a minority but they're still around.
2 comments
cestith 1868 days ago
Power ISA includes an endianness switch in the spec. Power and Power64 are all BE and LE. Most Linux distros only support modern versions on LE though. Debian has a BE port but it's not considered a primary release target.

The last PPC64 release of Ubuntu was 16.04 which is now out of support by about a month. Even on that, the two major web browsers didn't support building on the platform for a long time.

Yes, it can be done if you want enough to do it.

https://catfox.life/2018/11/03/clearing-confusion-regarding-... for more info

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tyingq 1868 days ago
Yes, I wasn't claiming that no big endian systems exist. Just that they are overwhelmingly in the minority now, and so the number of ASM byte swapping ops happening is mildy amusing.
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